


A Voice In The Dark

by TheWeatherman



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Different First Meeting, Bisexual Will, Canon-Typical Violence, Child Abuse, Hannibal is not the most ethical psychiatrist, Hurt/Comfort, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, M/M, Manipulative Hannibal, Mental Instability, Slow Burn, Supernatural Elements, Therapy, Will is a Mess, or not? you decide...
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-04
Updated: 2016-01-30
Packaged: 2018-05-11 19:37:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 14
Words: 58,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5639479
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheWeatherman/pseuds/TheWeatherman
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Will Graham is just a boy when he first hears the Voice, who promises to always look after him and asks for Will's protection in return. As he gets older, its influence over him continues to grow until one day it disappears all of a sudden, leaving him traumatised.</p><p>Years later, Will moves to Baltimore with his wife, Molly, and the Voice returns unexpectedly, forcing him to seek out therapy to keep his other half under control. However, his new psychiatrist may be less concerned with taming the Voice and more intrigued by it as Will starts to become increasingly reliant on his care.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Life On Stagnant Water

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mentions of child abuse

A remote bank by the river hummed under the watchful eye of a fat, silver moon. The waters of a squalid lake shifted uncomfortably under the authoritative glow; they knew of a secret hidden even from the penetrating white gleam of the moonlight. In amongst the reeds and the tall grass which shook in the wind, there lay a private microcosm of wonder and (more importantly) solitude.

Sleeping soundly, nestled into a hollowed out corner of the grassy embankment, was a small boy of about 5 or possibly even 6 in a tattered white t-shirt and black sandals. In a snug cocoon of mud and leaves, he lay curled up in a tight ball, his lips suckling the tip of his thumb. His other hand was clutching softly at his forearm. A bruise was barely visible from between his fingers, growing like mould on his pale skin. It was now swollen but fading from vibrant, flowering welts of red and purple to a sickly yellow-green hue. It didn’t hurt any more. He was uncertain he could feel anything any more.

His eyelids began to twitch, then his eyelashes slowly fluttered open and he awoke, torn from the mindless sleep he had been indulging in. Something had aroused his mind. He could have sworn that he had felt the ghostly hand of the wind nudging the back of his neck, or the cool breath of the sky rasping behind his ear. Sitting up, his chest heaving, he hugged his knees to himself and looked out into the darkness. He studied every blade of grass and pile of dirt and blooming weed, straining his eyes to find a presence whose existence became ever more doubtful. The young boy plucked his thumb from between his teeth and let out a meek, “Hello?”

The singing of crickets swelled in the air while the trees sighed, but there was no reply. The child stood and decided he was alone under the protection of his vigilant moon. That was until a hand grabbed at him and pulled him back into the dark underworld.

Screaming, he struggled to escape the firm grip of the fingers wrapped tightly around his ankle, but another hand managed to get a hold of his arm and forced him to turn to see his attacker. Only he saw no one.

“Hello?” he called out in distress, his tone urgent and terrified, his breathing erratic and panicked.

Again, he was met with silence, until–

“Hello.” The Voice was calm and controlled, almost gentle but with a sinister edge.

He gasped, numb with fear but trying to stand. “Don’t,” the Voice commanded and the boy felt a tug at his leg, “we’re being watched.”

“There’s no one else here…”

“Look up.”

He tilted his chin upwards and was met with the black expanse of sky that hung suspiciously low that night, as if trying to listen in. Considering the idea that some cosmic entity was sitting on one of the stars and watching his every move, the boy decided to believe the Voice and crouched back down.

“Good boy. Now don’t you want to know who I am?” The Voice seemed to giggle and the young boy sat back to burrow his small fingers into the rich, damp soil. He took a second to think about the question and his brow crumpled in thought.

“… Are you a boy or a girl?”

“I am neither.”

“You can’t be neither." 

“Yes, I can.” 

“But Papa says –” 

“Your papa lied to you,” the Voice hissed, cutting him off mid-sentence. 

Suddenly angry, the boy slammed his fists down into the dirt and shouted out into the night, “My Papa does not lie!” 

“He hit you, didn’t he?” the Voice snapped and grabbed the bruise on the child’s forearm roughly, silencing the boy’s anger as tears augmented and trembled precariously at his eyelashes. The grip weakened suddenly. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you. But I’ve been watching you and I saw what your Papa did. That wasn’t fair was it?” 

A single tear rolled down his round and flushed cheek as he shook his head. 

“Then it’s a good thing that I’ve decided to help you, isn’t it?” 

The boy blinked slowly and his chest tightened in delight at the thought of an ally, a friend. He nodded in reply and sat up intently, eager and ready. “Why do you want to help _me_?” he asked with a degree of incredulity that he attempted to repress. Within his own mind, he existed in the world as an insignificant and bothersome mosquito, buzzing in the background and leaving people vaguely aware of his presence, but causing more annoyance than creating any real impact. He was the sigh at the end of a sentence or an accidental splash of ink at the end of a long letter.  Tiny, little mosquito… Why else would his father have swatted at him, as if he were a mere pesky insect? Mosquitoes don’t get chosen for anything special — they live on stagnant water. 

“Because you’re mine and I’m yours. We’re going to look out for one another.” The Voice took on a saccharine tone, suddenly cloying and cosy, and the boy felt fingers grasping daintily at him from all angles. Whatever creature this Voice belonged to would need at least a dozen hands to have that many fingers, though. The touch was gentle and almost soothing, if not for the invisible nature of its employer. Nevertheless, the young boy found himself charmed. Granted, he was naïve and easily beguiled, but what child isn’t? Especially mosquitoes like him. “So do you promise to always look out for me?”

“I promise,” the boy said, his speech hushed and whispering into the darkness. Timidly, his small voice joined the night’s chorus and was met with a short reply. 

“Good.” He could hear the smirk from underneath the single word response.

Then there was nothing for a while. Just the simmering of anticipation, low in the boy’s guts, waiting for a response.

“Go home.”

“Huh?"

“I said, _go home_.” The Voice was caustic all of a sudden, speaking in a thin hiss out of a snake’s mouth. The boy felt its lips pressed tightly against his ear, the cold breath running eerily down his auditory canal. He didn’t stick around to argue and hastily pulled himself onto his feet before freeing himself from the reeds’ tangled prison. Running home, the Voice followed, only a few steps behind him.

_“Remember, you promised to always look after me. And I’ll always be looking after you, too.”_

The words played like a broken record in his skull as his feet hit the ground, providing beat and percussion for the haunting lyrics. He didn’t question the nature or origin of the Voice, but seemed to know instinctively not to tell a soul about it. His little secret, their little game.

He knew the way home easily. He often walked that same route with his father on their way to the boatshed out by the lake, his favourite place in all the world. On the hot Summer days, he would sit on the decking and dangle his feet into the murky green lake, eating the ice chips out of the cooler as he kicked his legs and splashed himself with water. If he was well-behaved, his father might let him try a sip of his beer before they made the journey back home: the same journey he was making that night.

When he lay eyes on his ramshackle home, his heart nearly burst with relief and he quickly took off his sandals to sprint the last couple of yards, bursting in through the front door with a shoe on each hand, panting and sweating. The interior was cold and damp, but humming with a certain anxiety. His father was waiting for him. The boy froze as footsteps thundered along the floorboards, causing entire rooms to shake at the foundation’s disturbance, rattling his bones inside his small body.

The footsteps stopped suddenly and the boy’s father was immediately before him, worry etched into all his features but softened by relief. The boy would take on those same features one day: the curled brown hair, defined jaw line and lean body. He would only miss out on the genetics that provided such a tall stature, struggling to reach 6 feet while his father had always towered high, high above friends and strangers alike. He was all long limbs that were thrown about too easily and the older man was determined to keep them pulled close to his torso at all times, to minimise the collateral damage from his gawky frame. One hand held a pack of matches and the other, a recently lit cigarette, forgotten as soon as he heard the door open. He dropped the cigarette and the matches at his side and rushed to his son, warm with affection.

Yet he lingered, afraid to touch, and the boy daren’t initiate the display of affection. Hugging was for other boys, but not him. He smiled sheepishly instead and was rewarded with an awkward pat on the shoulder. A love that was confined by discomfort and accompanied by a silent apology was keenly welcomed by the boy, even as he inwardly pleaded for something more.

Once, then twice, the large hand landed on the boy’s right shoulder as if to admit, “This is the best I can do, son.”


	2. The Unfamiliar Language Of Youth

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for the comments/kudos! Another warning for mentions of child abuse.

Silence was a foreign concept to Will. The ceaseless noise was unavoidable, echoing from all corners of the small manor that he’d gradually come to call Home. The manor sat crumbling leisurely at the end of a long road that ran alongside the bayou, far from the town where he grew up. It could house around a dozen children and two adults (unattached staff members with more authority than genuine fondness) at any one time.

From the constant smell of damp to the wallpaper that flaked and peeled like a form of psoriasis, the house was in a constant state of dilapidation and disrepair. Water seemed to leak in from all surfaces: dripping down from the high ceilings and seeping up out of the floorboards, which creaked and groaned at the slightest movement from anywhere in the room. Even a light breeze was enough to have the windows rattling cantankerously in their frames, causing entire walls to shudder and shake. 

 _Alive_ , was the only word Will could think of to the describe the place upon his arrival. The sounds and smells and lethargic ageing of the manor made him picture it as a great and magnificent animal, finally laying down on its deathbed and expiring without an ounce of grace or dignity. It clung onto to its last inches of life with desperation, wheezing and howling and spluttering all the way. Never was this more apparent than at night when the house settled, all of the wooden structures sagging and letting out pained moans as they did so. It was ugly and depressing and left Will feeling as if he was growing up in the acrid innards of a corpse. He grew painfully aware that he would wear its skin for the rest of his life. Your childhood never deserts you; it births you and it moulds you and leaves you covered in its foul stench.

The stale murkiness became attractive for some forms of life, accommodating families of moths in every cupboard and pantry, along with their maggot spawn that burrowed into the nooks and crannies. Every speck of dust sprouted legs and crawled across the garish wallpaper, every crack in the skirting boards was home to a long-legged spider, every square foot of air was occupied by some minuscule creature with beating wings. Life was everywhere, inescapably so. 

Hoots and hollers were audible all hours of the day, the strange din of childish fun: a language Will had never quite learned. As soon as they awoke, they were all gleefully chirping along with the birds, then screaming in joy and wailing in sadness. Emotions ran hot at all hours and formed a sultry smoke that permeated the atmosphere, choking all of the inhabitants. They shouted and called to and fro across the house, from one end to the other, delighting in the booming echo as the vibrations from theirs throats reverberated throughout every room.

Most of the children would take a few weeks to settle in after their arrival, though they soon became fish in water as they adapted to survive. Resources were scarce and care was second rate, but the home provided a certain amount of freedom that most of the children had never experienced before, often arriving from abusive households rather than neglectful ones. The rule was ‘no running indoors’, but there was always the drum of tiny feet across wobbly landings and pounding up the hollow staircases, resulting in a thunderous stampede.

They didn’t require many toys or playthings because they were all so perfectly in touch with their imaginations in a way that Will wasn’t. He was perfectly aware he had an imagination and a fairly fantastic one at that… Too fantastic. He had seen too much horror for a young boy and was too capable of recreating it, so he repressed it. Instead, he was an observer to the unfamiliar languages and spectacles of youth that were re-enacted by his peers.

It was not unbearable for Will, because it was better than the alternative.

When the noise in the house finally died, not long after dusk, Will’s head was instantly flooded with whispered words. The Voice emerged, able to finally speak after being muffled by others all day. Will was vulnerable to it then, lying in the darkness with his private companion. Sharing his room with two other boys, he had to struggle to not reply out loud the way he did when he was on his own and they could talk freely. He didn’t need the other children finding more reasons to call him strange. 

“That Bethany is a bitch,” the Voice spat with contempt as soon as Miss Barbaret had called for lights out and Will had climbed willingly under his duvet. He had to bite his tongue not to berate the Voice for its scathing language and blatant rudeness, but a part of him was inclined to agree. “Who does she think she is anyway? She’s only been here a few months and she thinks she can start picking on you! You’ve been here 4 years now, Will. You should be asserting yourself.” 

Assertiveness was a quality that Will severely lacked and would certainly enjoy more of, but he had to question what exactly “asserting himself” would entail in this specific instance. He tried to hum a song in his own mind, shut it out. He was tired and only wanted to sleep, but felt a slight pinch on his arm. Harsh and hard fingers snapped at the flesh. _Don’t ignore me._

“She insulted you. She made you cry. Like a little baby.” There was a tiny snigger, a gurgle of nastiness, relishing in petty cruelty.

Will bit down on his lip and tried to dispel the shame. His tears were emotional but never histrionic. They only required a dark corner for him to turn himself away from the world and release the pent up anger and frustration he was constantly trying to bury. 

She’d called him a freak that day, right in front of everyone, even Miss Barbaret. It wouldn’t have been so horrible if everyone hadn’t looked at him afterwards with blank faces. They didn’t disagree. He was a freak. Was he going to deny it? Was he going to argue, fight back, like any normal boy might do? Their blank faces stared at him. She stood there looking self-righteous in her neatly-ironed pinafore and long, brown plaits. She was as perfect as one of the school girls who Will used to see getting off the buses in town when he was younger: all straight lines and fine symmetry and aesthetic geometry. 

Bethany was reprimanded, of course, but nobody sought out Will to console him. Nobody thought that he would like be told that he wasn’t a freak after all. He accepted it quickly and left the table to go to his room, where he curled up under a blanket on his cot and let a hot flush of tears wash over his face, dampening his cheeks thoroughly. When he was a little boy, he would compare himself to a mosquito. It was his father who had first used the word to describe him in a flash of irritation after Will had nipped his hand in a frantic bid for attention. Then he was swatted away.

Will hesitated to make the comparison at the age of 10, couldn’t bear to dredge up memories of his father’s face: the anger, the sorrow. As he lay in bed that evening and wept, it was the only image he could think about. His Papa, towering above him, that large hand clapping down on him. Will felt the ghost of his father’s hands, then he began feeling the slight roughness of the skin on his arms and back where the scars had formed. He was grotesque and deformed: a freak.

 _Freak_. He couldn’t have come up with a more fitting term, yet Bethany flippantly hurled it at him as if it were his own damn name. _What a bitch_.

“Let’s teach her a lesson.” The Voice was practically purring as he lay in bed, excited for a taste of vengeance.

“No!” Will hissed, before quickly muffling himself with his own pillow. No lessons. No karmic retribution. None of that.

“It would be fun…”

Will refused to be drawn in and hummed louder in his head; it was a song about doctors and saints and Eskimos. Pinch, pinch, pinch, up and down his small arms.

“You’re such a pushover. No wonder she thinks she can walk all over you. They all do. Even Miss Barbaret. They all treat you like the freak that you are because you let them, Will. I just want to teach you to stand up for yourself.”

Finally, the boy broke, pulling his arms away from his face, batting away the insubstantial fingers.

“What exactly do you suggest?” Will whispered as quietly as he could possibly manage, conceding to the Voice fairly quickly this time. But then again, he was aware of its penchant for persistence.

“She came here with so many nice little trinkets. Let’s take one.” Will remembered how she looked down on him with the face of a girl from an old portrait: her beautifully pale skin and rose lips, the image of a child that an artist would desire to paint. She encapsulated the beauty and innocence of tender childhood in her air of delicate perfection. Will fumed. “She probably wouldn’t even notice, she has so many.”

“Then what would be the point?” Will was growing to the idea, picturing the glimpse of twinkling onyx around her neck fitting into the palm of his hand, crushing it in his fist with wicked pleasure.

“We’d know. It would be funny.”

Will dwelled on the thought for a second, the satisfaction of taking something from her and keeping it all to himself. It would protect him from her abuse, because he knew something she didn’t. And he had his own friend that none of them knew about. He didn’t need any of them.

He pulled his head out from under his duvet and craned his neck to look at the door, where a crack of light shone from underneath. He only had to wait until the lights were turned off, then he could sneak into the room, silent as ever. He was good at being quiet. He had a lot of practice. Silence was survival.

So when the lights in the hallway were finally switched off and he heard Miss Barbaret retreat into her quarters, Will rose from his pillow and carefully pushed back his covers as quietly as he possibly could. The other boys would be asleep by then anyway, but he couldn’t be too careful. As he padded across the floorboards, his bare soles picked up a fine layer of dirt on his way to the door. The girls room was only down the hall, just a few inconspicuous steps away. Behind him, he could feel his friend trailing, keeping close enough to radiate its presence onto his back as a sort of hot energy or obscure spectre. Will tried to channel that same impalpability as he slinked down the hallway.

He crept as silently as the moon and stars on a Winter night and when he reached the door he pressed the side of his face against it, his ear pushed right up to the wood so that he could listen to any life stirring on the other side. Nothing.

“Well go on then!” he heard The Voice goading him when he paused to consider whether he should really go through with it. He didn’t move at the encouragement, suddenly filled with anxiety. “Coward,” it hissed, taking his hand, now curled into a tense fist, and prying the fingers apart to pull it to the door handle. Will fought it with all his might, before wrenching it free abruptly and then tumbling to the floor. The entire house groaned in the aftermath of his fall and his breath hitched in his throat. He waited one second, two, three… He heard movement, before a light switched on and created beams of light from the door at the end of the hallway.

In a panic, Will pulled himself to his feet and silently slipped into the girls’ room. They all still slept peacefully. Right by the window, Bethany slept, her silhouette illuminated by the moon’s glow. It was watching over her, the same way it used to watch over him.

“Look under her bed,” the Voice commanded and Will was quick to comply when he heard Miss Barbaret’s door creak open and prayed she didn’t come in search of troublemakers. The room was hardly an obstacle course, but the 4 girls’ beds were crammed in tightly and he had to be sure to sneak seamlessly past every single one to get to Bethany’s. Just as he reached his destination at the final bed, he heard Miss Barbaret’s door close again and when it wasn’t shortly followed by footsteps in the hall, he assumed that she’d returned to bed.

Dropping to his hands and knees, he searched the space under her cot and saw a small jewellery box in the space directly underneath her pillow. Lowering himself further down, he pressed his body flat against the floor and surreptitiously slid underneath the bed, inching towards his treasure. Every so often he stopped, held his breath, listened for any signs of the girls in the room waking up. Eventually, after a nail-biting couple of minutes crawling along like a paranoid snail, he reached the box. It was made of oak, finely carved and polished to a shimmering gleam. It was the most exquisite item he’d ever laid eyes on and probably the most expensive. He hesitated to go through with it until he felt something prodding the back of his neck obsessively and he snatched the box up, pulling it right to his face and running his fingers across the woodwork with wonder and awe. Every mark was intentional, precise, and he read it like Braille underneath his skin. When he was done examining it, he found the edge of the lid and wedged his fingers underneath to prise it open. It was stiff at first, but then popped open with one final jerk and—

The music sounded out like a full orchestra in the silence. Immediately, Will slammed the box shut but it was too late.

The room murmured as the bed springs above him creaked. He heard the rustling of covers, as Bethany awoke and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress to dangle right next to Will’s head.  Will was paralysed. He hugged the box even closer and tried his hardest not to breathe heavily or too shakily. Squeezing his eyes shut, he swore he would never ever listen to the Voice ever again.

“You’ve done it now,” it hissed, “You idiot! Hold your breath, you’re breathing too loudly! She’s going to hear you, Mr Wheezy!”

The movement above his head stopped for a few short seconds, before a deafening scream awoke the entire household. 

Will dared not open his eyes. He knew he had been discovered. He heard Bethany leap from the bed and the rest of the girls in the room suddenly crying out in fear and shock. He squeezed his eyes even tighter shut as the Voice roared with laughter. “Actually this is quite fun,” it admitted before bellowing out, “I am the bogeyman!” and prodding him again and again, asking him to join in with the taunting that only he could hear. 

He hummed his song out loud, as loud as he possibly could. He had to drown it out, shut it up, just stop the terrible noise in his head. 

“Oh my god, Will? Is that you?” It was Sarah, one of the nicer girls who would sometimes finish off his dinner if he wasn’t hungry. He didn’t want to be cursed at by the cook or Miss Barbaret, so Sarah would always silently switch plates when their backs were turned. Something told him that she wouldn’t be extending him that courtesy any longer. 

The door burst open and Will heard multiple voices joining in the commotion. He said nothing, continued to hum his song about lighting a candle and how all the mosquitoes came swarming.

“Will?” Miss Barbaret cried out, both terrified and outraged. She was marching over to where he lay. Still he refused to look up, hummed even louder, so loud that it was practically choked screams pouring out of him rattling his entire body with his paroxysmal terror.

“He’s possessed!” one of the younger children cried.

“He’s insane!” another one exclaimed. 

“What do you think you’re doing?” That was Bethany’s voice. Suddenly he was being yanked out from under the bed, screamed at, someone was bawling, an open hand landed hard against his cheek and all the while the Voice cackled. 

_“I am your worst nightmare!”_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I would love to it all gets better for Will soon. I really would. But I also love whumping him, so...
> 
> Also, I'm sorry if I go all over the place switching between British English and Americanisms. I would generally keep it consistently in my native tongue despite the setting, but I've had some trouble changing the dictionary from US English on my laptop.


	3. Our Lady of The Harbour

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Another warning for mentions of child abuse (it won't actually be in every chapter).

“ _Suzanne takes you down to her place near the river_ ,” the Voice hummed idly as Will strode along the muddy path, swinging a bucket of stolen chicken carcasses in one hand, causing him to beam inwardly. It was their song, a nostalgic tune from his childhood before he left his first home. He hadn’t heard it in years, but the words rang out with clarity in his mind. Underneath them, his imagination conjured up the subdued strumming of a guitar and the fuzzy clicking from a gramophone needle. He knew that his companion heard it all too, in seamless synchronisation. Their minds were coiled together.

Will chuckled faintly and joined in, singing, “ _You can hear the boats go by, you can spend the night beside her_ ,” back in a coarse, low drawl: his best impression of the singer’s voice. The Voice took over from there, singing each word in its own distinctive susurration. It was vaguely eerie, but kept Will good company on his journey that warm spring morning.

When it had finished, it asked him, “So whose perfect body do you want to touch?” playfully, sniggering slightly, rustling his hair with its slippery fingers like a mischievous older brother.

“I don’t want to touch anyone’s perfect body,” Will answered defensively, flicking the fingers away and not entirely sure if that was an honest answer or not. But that was their game. From playful teasing and half-truths to sudden invectiveness and scathing rows.

Will could fight back now. Not like before, when he only tried to drown it out. He could defend himself and it enjoyed that, the same way an older sibling enjoys hearing their younger brother’s screams when they pull his hair. And it always kept a light grip, just so it could pull tighter when it needed to.

The sun was breaking through the foliage in glowing streams of amber and illuminating Will’s path through the trees, though he knew the way well enough. He’d first started making trips to his old boat shed in the Autumn and had found a convincing reason to return since then.

Now, it was his safe haven, the idyllic castle from his childhood. Maybe it was slightly dirtier and more rundown than he remembered — his father clearly hadn’t been making regular visits. The old motorboat was rusted and broken beyond repair, but that didn’t upset Will. Far from it, he took the opportunity to pull the whole thing apart, start examining its components and seeing how it all fit together. He enjoyed it the same way many boys his age enjoyed their televisions and video games. But they were luxuries that Will didn’t necessarily desire anyway.

“I’m gonna buy another one, one day. I’m going to live right here by the river and take my boat out on the water every single day,” he’d fantasise, much to the bitter amusement of his friend, but he believed in it with all his heart. He was too young to be concerned with adult trepidations like money and a job, but just believed in a distant dream. Isolation and loneliness wouldn’t ever become a problem as far as he could imagine; he was already so accustomed to being left out and ignored.

After the time he tried to steal Bethany’s jewellery box when he was 10, they all looked at him as if he was something more than just a little strange — a conclusion he’d already drawn about himself years and years before. Suddenly he was more than someone to merely ignore and instead a grotesque thing to point and snicker at. The period of taunting came to an abrupt end, however, when he was successfully goaded by a certain someone into biting Bethany until he drew blood. He was severely punished, but it was worth it to be feared rather than mocked. Or at least not mocked right in front of his face.

That was why Will made the journey to the boat shed every single week: to escape. He’d come to accept his identity as the freak, the outcast; it no longer bothered him. In fact, it felt quite liberating to be able to withdraw from the rest of the world and defend himself by arguing that he just wasn’t meant to get along with the other children. That’s why he was given a special friend that only he could hear and feel. They were going to look out for each other.

As the Voice listed the pretty girls at the home, whom Will rarely paid much mind to anyway, they came to a row of prickly bushes with a small opening at the bottom that must have originally been dug by a small animal and then further broached by larger and larger creatures, Will included. First, he set the bucket down and lowered himself to the ground, tucking in all his limbs so that he could wrestle his way through the shrubbery. Sharp twigs and brambles clung at him and tore away at his skin but he didn’t mind. He emerged on the other side with hot beads of blood trickling down his arms and leaves caught in his tousled mop of brown hair. He was now on the path that he used to walk as a kid, leading back to his childhood home. If he wanted to, he could follow it, be back there in less than an hour. He didn’t want to.

Instead, he crouched back down and reached back under the bush to pull the bucket through. Just in time, too, as a large Alsatian came bounding into view. Will laughed and greeted her joyfully. She was equally as excited to see him and jumped up at him, her paws in the air and her tail wagging enthusiastically.

“Hang on, hang on!” Will called out cheerfully, raising the bucket over his head so that the dog couldn’t reach its inquisitive nose in and steal one of the chicken legs. At the sound of his voice, two more dogs appeared from the nearby boat shed: a terrier called Lenny and an old mutt called Mary. They both rushed over to him excitedly, their ears pricking up with interest at the sight of the bucket and the smell wafting out of it.

He’d started collecting strays a couple of months ago, starting with Mary, who’d followed him from the home on his second visit to the boat shed and she was as skinny as a rake. So he put her safely inside the shed and brought a bowl of fresh water the next day and half of his dinner inside an old container that he’d found in the trash. About a month later, Lenny had come during feeding time and Will decided to keep him. He started picking out the remains of the Sunday roasts from the bins and collecting them in a bucket. Once there, he pulled the leftover meat from the bones and divided it between the two of them.

The Alsatian was new, having swam into the boat shed from the lake and emerged a few days before, just as Will was leaving. She leapt out of the water and onto the decking, shaking her sodden coat out onto the other two dogs, who reacted with both fear and curiosity. He gave her fresh water and she lapped it up with the thirst of a dog that had been drinking only murky lake water for a while and he knew that he had to take care of her. So they formed their little pack and Will felt as if he had a family for the first time in his life.

 “Decided on a name yet?” the Voice asked as Will marched towards the shed with the bucket of food still held high above his head.

“Not yet.”

“Well, what about Suzanne?”

Will considered it as his fingers plucked the greasy flesh from the bones, careful to make sure only meat went into the feeding bowl and nothing that could splinter and hurt them. His responsibility for the dogs was awakening a nurturing side to him that he wasn’t quite sure existed until then. When he was done, he let the dogs lick the remains of the chicken meat from his fingers and tried out the name.

“Suzanne… Our lady of the harbour.” Her tongue hungrily lapped at his hands, from fingers up to his wrists, then she sat back and beamed up him. She stood twice as high as the other two dogs, like their guardian.  “Yeah, it fits.” He lifted the bowls and got each dog to sit, before placing their meal before them.

“Suzie for short,” the Voice suggested, sounding proud of its own contribution. Will smiled at the suggestion and repeated the name a couple of times to himself. He liked it.

Afterwards, the dogs followed him out to the edge of the lake where he sat with his legs dangling in the water, swilling his feet around and feeling all of the slimy undergrowth brush at his toes with their nimble, tickling fingers. Sometimes his friend would reach down and tickle his feet to make him laugh, then continue listing pretty girls, before moving on to boys, at which Will blushed and said, “No!” just a little too quickly but thankfully the Voice didn’t catch on and returned to girls’ names.

Suzie and Mary took the opportunity to swim in the water, paddling in circles before climbing out and shaking their wet coats all over Will. Lenny was scared and sat loyally at his side while Will scratched his head. Sometimes he wondered if the voice longed to pet the dogs too, since Will was his only vessel for which to touch the world through. It could only make contact physically by using Will, controlling him.

He wanted to stay long into the night, just the 5 of them, but had to be back for lunch and then schooling in the afternoon. Will didn’t mind the school. He was all right with the work, but he wasn’t entirely sure how qualified their tutor was and couldn’t imagine that his education would earn him many university placements when he was older. He didn’t mind. He didn’t need a diploma to ride his boats up and down the river.

“Sarah?” the Voice probed, at which Will snorted.

“You know Sarah hasn’t spoken to me in years.” _Not since you made me scare her off when I was about 10_ , he thought with mild bitterness, but it was short-lived. He rarely held it against the Voice. He didn’t actually lament his lack of corporeal friends.

“She has nice eyes.”

“You’ve clearly noticed.” Will could tease it back, but wasn’t sure how much of it could really be the desires of a separate being and how much of it was… him. But he didn’t like that thought. He didn’t like it at all.

“Bethany?”

“Bethany?!” he guffawed. “Are you jok—”

He heard a discreet gasp. The same sort of gasp he made that night under Bethany’s bed, having been discovered. It was the fearful gasp of somebody trying to muffle themselves, fearing they had been exposed. 

Suddenly he was alert and stood up, whipping around to see if anybody else was there. There was a vast area of trees and greenery to hide behind if somebody felt the need to. Will squinted into the shifting shades of green and their fluttering patterns, tuning out the sounds of the dogs playing in the water. Lenny noticed his actions, though, and stood beside him with his hackles raised and his tail rigid, growling faintly.

She emerged of her own volition, hands on her hips and looking smug and pious. Then again, she always did, like some sort of conceited nun, throwing rosary beads at the other naughty children and burning them with her righteously scorched crucifix.

“What are you doing here, Bethany?” Will hissed, afraid of what might happen.

“I followed you,” she replied casually, as if she weren’t admitting to stalking him. She had other concerns, clearly: “Who were you talking to?” She cocked her head at him, pushed out a hip indignantly, demanded an answer with her superior body language. 

“None of your business,” Will snapped, rushing over to where she stood and ushering her back to the hole in the bushes. He quickly concluded she must have gone through it, too, because there was a long and ragged red scratch down her forearm. He wondered if his blood got into hers and wondered how that might affect her, like a mosquito bite. “This is my place. Leave,” he commanded, grabbing her wrist and pulling her with him, but she was a sturdy girl and stayed firmly in place. 

“Lucas says he hears you talking to yourself all the time. While you steal food out of the bins. He said that you eat it because you’re crazy, but I said no, you’re far too skinny to eat all of that. So you give it to the dogs, do you? I wonder what Miss Barbaret will say about that,” she teases, smirking at him evilly. 

 _“She’s a fucking bitch who needs to be taught a lesson. Bite her again. Harder.”_  

Will ignored the Voice and changed his tone to one that plead softly, “Please, Bethany. I just want to take care of them. They’ll die without me.”

“Take them to a shelter then,” she said flippantly, walking away from him towards the lake where Lenny still stood and accepted her greeting guardedly. She crouched down next to him in her pleated skirt and shiny buckled-up shoes and started rubbing his ears gently. Fury rose inside Will. This wasn’t her place. They weren’t her dogs. She needed to _leave_. 

“They’ll kill them at the shelter. They kill the dogs that are too old or too sick,” Will raged, marching back over to her where she sat petting his dog. He stood over her, unsure of how to continue. He didn’t want to hit her and certainly didn’t want to bite her again. He could still remember the taste of the coppery blood as it filled his mouth. She still had a small scar on her wrist. So he simply stood there with his hands balled into fists and noiselessly fumed. 

“They won’t last long here on scraps either,” she pointed out and Will knew she was right. Lenny was still tiny as ever, his ribs visible from under his fur. 

“Push her in,” the Voice breathed, right into his ear so that the words perforated his ear drum and drove deep into his brain. He shook his head defiantly and barked, “No!” back at it. 

“No what?” Bethany asked absentmindedly, now moving to stroke Mary as she emerged from the water, excited to greet someone new. 

Frustrated, Will suddenly turned on her, snarling, “Just because your parents abandoned you at a home to rot away doesn’t mean I’m going to do it to my dogs, too!” 

She scoffed and stood up, her hand flying to the pendant around her neck, one that he once tried to steal. He’d heard her bragging about how her mother had given it to her along with all the rest of her jewellery and it was all worth a fortune. He wanted to snatch it now and throw it in the river, but she clung to it with an emotion he’d never experienced. “You’re one to talk, Graham. We’ve all seen those ugly little scars on your back. What, did your Daddy like to use you as an ashtray or—” 

 _“Push her in the fucking lake, Will. Watch her drown.”_  

“Shut up!” Will screamed. Fingers were pulling at his own as he squeezed his fists even tighter and tried not to give it any control, his nails cutting into his palms, reopening old wounds. He couldn’t start having a full-on fight with it in front of her. 

“What? You can dish it out, but you can’t take it?” she tormented, her hand still clutched at her neck. Her fist was about as tight as his and twitching slightly, straining the chain to the point where it looked like it might snap any second.

The bucket was nearby, filled with water for the dogs to drink from and Will was being dragged towards it, pushed and pulled by invisible hands that longed for violent retaliation. All the while, it incited him: “Do it, Will, do it! Kill the bitch!” 

“You need to be quiet, Bethany,” Will growled, trying with all his might to not give in, even as his feet edged closer to the bucket. 

“What are you going to do about it?” she mocked, her voice staggering slightly as she held back some sentiment that choked up her throat. 

All of a sudden, Will’s hands relaxed then tensed up again, as if his skin were a glove that he’d just slipped out of and a new hand had slid into its place, fitting in with disturbing comfort. His fist was closed around the bucket’s handle, then he swung it with all his might and it connected with her temple with a horrid sound. She collapsed backwards instantly, falling into the lake. 

“Oh shit!” Will screamed, dropping the bucket and rushing to the water in a panic. Without a second thought, he slipped off his shoes and pulled his shirt over his head before jumping in. 

“What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it, Will, we’re almost rid of the bitch!” it roared in an abnormally deep and gravelly voice such that Will had never heard it speak in, but he paid it no heed as he met the water with a splash and was quickly enveloped in the turbid green. 

The water was about 7 feet deep, but made up of about 3 feet of tangled reeds that sprouted from the water’s bed and quickly knotted any unsuspecting divers in its bewildering web. Straining to see through the muddy lake water, Will could only barely make out Bethany’s motionless body sinking like a rock into the thick wilderness below. 

At first, Will thought it was the reeds pulling at his feet as he swam towards Bethany, but then realised with a sickening feeling what was really happening. It was clawing up his body, pulling itself up his legs to his bare torso to grab at his arms and engage him in a wrestling match that Will was determined to win. He kicked and struggled against the force, reaching for Bethany’s limp arm. She looked like a rag doll that had been carelessly dropped by its owner, lost to the water, swimming with the fish. Blood poured from a gash in her forehead, coiling out into the water like smoke from a flame.

Will imagined that he probably looked like he was spasming as he jerked and squirmed away from the wraithlike force clinging to him. and pulling her body towards him defiantly. He jolted his arm and succeeded in pulling it free, then managed to get a grip on Bethany’s wrist, his thumb moving over the scar he gave her. Holding on with all his strength, he tugged at her dead weight and managed to move his hand up her arm and pulled her towards him. Hugging her body to his and swimming jerkily back towards the surface with phantom hands grasping at him from all angles, he felt some resistance as her foot got snagged in the dense, watery jungle, but it only took a couple of strong tugs to pull her free. 

Carrying her lifeless frame, he started back towards the surface, when he heard, “ _Drop her_ ,” hissed into his ear and felt his arms being torn away from her. She began to slip from his grip, back into the miry undergrowth as Will and his other half fought for control. “I told you to _drop her_! Drown her, Will!” it barked, over and over from all directions, both inside and outside of his skull. One of Will’s hands was pressed firmly against the top of her head, trying to force her back down and the other clung at her waist while his legs kicked and splashed, trying to propel them both out of the water. 

One more kick. One final kick and he could break the surface… 

As he felt his oxygen starting to drain, his eyes filled with tears and he strained to hold onto his breath for the last few seconds… until he finally gave in and inhaled deeply through his nostrils, immediately filling his lungs with filthy water. He spluttered and choked, but didn’t give up. 

Determinedly, Will channelled all of his remaining strength to his leg muscles and kicked them, thrusting himself and Bethany up to the open air and sweet relief of oxygen back in his lungs. He heaved her body out of the water before climbing out himself and coughing his guts up along with a fair amount of dirty water onto the ground. But he didn’t have time to recover yet. Working fast, he sat Bethany up and slammed the heel of his palm between her shoulder blades three times, producing the same upchuck of water as his on the final blow. 

He collapsed, careful to lay Bethany back down on his side. He silently prayed that he hadn’t killed her with the initial blow, that it wasn’t all for nothing and he would have to run away with only the Voice for company… 

But then he noticed something that made shivers run up and down his spine. It was eerily quiet. He could only hear his own laboured breathing and the panting of the dogs as they excitedly ran around Bethany’s unconscious body and licked at her face, cleaning up the wound on her forehead. 

He felt no phantom hands. He heard no ghostly voice. 

There was nothing.

Nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be the last of Will's childhood chapters. I was considering splitting them up throughout the fic like flashbacks, but it felt too similar to another story I'm writing and I figured it was all pretty important to understand this universe's Will Graham as an adult.
> 
> Bethany, an OC, was brought in as an Abigail-type character (though this is the last we'll see of her). I even considered changing her name a couple of times, but it felt a bit forced. She was never meant to BE Abigail, though seeing as this Will never comes across the Hobbs family, I wanted someone who still brought out similar characteristics in him like responsibility, though not necessarily in the same paternal way.
> 
> Remember the song, btw, it will return.
> 
> Thanks again for the kudos/comments. Next chapter we may even get a mention of our so-far elusive psychiatrist ;)


	4. Sunset On the Chesapeake Bay

Will stood at the edge of a bleak parking lot, blinking up into the blindingly grey sky as he examined the tall apartment building. It was virtually imperceptible against the backdrop, coincidentally made out of rock that happened to be the exact same dreary shade of grey. Already, he’d shoved his hands deep into the pockets of his large fishing jacket and was fumbling nervously with the keys for his old house. He should have gone to Baltimore to see the new place before he’d packed up all his stuff and moved. He knew he should have and now scolded himself for his laziness.

It felt surreal somehow. The change was all too vast, too sudden. From the pleasant solitude of the Virginia countryside and its muted but charming scenery to the bustle of Baltimore and its winding roads and sprawl of buildings. He almost felt as if he couldn’t go through with it. Then he felt a warm body approach, a gloved hand sliding into his pocket and taking hold of his anxious, blundering fingers.

“You’re going to love it, I promise,” Molly said with total sincerity as she rested her chin on Will’s shoulder and gazed up at their new home with him. “Okay, the outside is a bit… unexciting. But that’s just how they design all the apartment buildings in the city. They look really fancy inside. And there’s a beautiful view!”

Will didn’t want fancy. He didn’t want a beautiful view. He wanted the warm comforts of a safe home: his ship drifting in the foggy waters, now abandoned at sea.

“Is it too late to change my mind?” Will half-joked, sending Molly a bashful smile to convey he wasn’t being entirely serious about his disdain, though there was certainly a great degree of truth in it.

“Yes,” she deadpanned, before giving him a quick kiss on the cheek and prying his fingers away from his keys to pull him by the hand towards the entrance.

 Molly was right, it was much nicer inside. Not home, but definitely not just the bleak structure that it appeared from the outside. The lobby had dingy but atmospheric lighting that burned amongst the dark colours: burgundy and indigo and olive. It created the effect of a muffled glow from behind heavy curtains, but reminded Will enigmatically of the house where he’d grown up with all of its shadowy tones and sprawling wallpaper patterns.

Their new apartment was 3B. Will stood before the door, hand in hand with Molly, feeling as if he was about to step into a new chapter of his life. He was prone to compartmentalising life events in this way, storing certain memories in different parts of his mind like an epic file cabinet. He knew which drawers were darker than others, which places he couldn’t risk revisiting and which ones he could take a leisurely stroll through. There wasn’t much that he could open up from before he was about 13, after the disappearance of his old friend. In fact, there was only one memory he could indulge in at will, back from when he was about 5 years old, sitting with his father and playing that old record…

“Will, honey, you’re about to break my fingers,” Molly hummed, trying to maintain a small smile as Will realised he’d been squeezing tighter and tighter, letting his anxiety get the better of him. He dropped her hand suddenly and she flexed the fingers with a short laugh. “I understand,” she said, getting out a brand new set of keys. “This is a huge move for you. It’s scary. And it’s scary for me, too. We’ll find you a job, pick your dogs up from the kennels in a couple of weeks and you’ll settle in just fine.” 

“I just want you to be happy, Molly,” Will sighed, very aware that she wouldn’t be happy either unless he was. 

The door opened and Will was initially taken aback. It was so open, so empty. It felt fresh, but not in a comforting way. The floorboards were solid oak and clean but looked as if they’d never been walked on. The room was totally bare of furniture aside from a couple of chairs and a side table in the corner. Curtains hadn’t yet been fitted and there was what appeared to be the shelves from a flatpack bookcase leaning against a wall. It was unlived in — a blank canvas, yearning for the dab of a brush and stroke of paint to make a masterpiece. Still, Will doubted that he was the right artist for the job as he gazed at the dauntingly unfamiliar austerity of his new home. 

Molly strode in confidently and looked back at Will, beckoning him in, but he lingered uncertainly in the doorway.  It dawned on him that his first step inside was going to change everything and he wanted to cling to the past for as long as he possibly could, before time and circumstance propelled him into unacquainted territory.

“Well, it will obviously look much better once we bring up the furniture. I picked up a couple of things from a thrift store down the road,” Molly rambled as she hurried over to the table and chairs and introduced them with a flourish, like she was showcasing something far more fantastic than second-hand furniture. She took a deep breath and smiled blithely. “Didn’t you forget what it was like to live somewhere that didn’t smell of dog?”

Will took a few tentative steps into the apartment. He breathed in. He’d liked the smell of dog…

His wife sensed his hesitation because she marched right over to him and took his hand in her own, giving his fingers a short squeeze of encouragement and forcing him to make eye contact. Will found it comforting but also felt mildly patronised. Then again, he had been moody as a toddler the entire drive over there, so he probably brought it on himself.

“Will, I want you to look around this apartment and tell me 3 things you like about it. If you can’t find 3 things, we go back home.”

Will looked down at her then rolled his eyes. She knew he would try to find those 3 things if only to satisfy her. He took a quick walk around the main room, pausing to gaze out the window. He could see the grey expanse of the horizon and beyond it the milky swirl of pink and mauve that bled into the sky from the setting sun and reflected off the shimmering waters of the Chesapeake Bay, framed by the perpendicular lines and sharp angles of the surrounding buildings, all their hundreds and hundreds of windows shining like mirrors.

“I like the view,” he admitted, watching it for some time before turning back to Molly who was already beaming at his one positive acknowledgement. She held up one finger, tallying up his commendations.

He walked round the rest of the room to the kitchen, which was already gleaming with shiny, new appliances. There was a kettle and a toaster; a dozen pots or pans that hadn’t yet been put away; unopened packages of plates and bowls that sat next to the stove.

“I thought we could do with some new stuff. Your toaster has definitely seen better days,” she joked and he flashed a short smile at her. The room was fairly big. He wasn’t a very keen chef, but he liked the idea of Molly having plenty of space to get around and he admired the good condition of the worktops. At one end of the room, there was another door which he opened to reveal a sizeable pantry. “I thought,” Molly announced, rushing round to the other side of the door and flicking on the light switch, “that we could use this room for storing the dogs’ stuff? _And_ there’s a small road round the back of the car park that leads right down to a footpath which one of the locals told me is great for walking dogs.”

Will nodded. “Okay. I like that idea.” He didn’t say that he preferred back in Virginia where he could simply open up the door and let his dogs roam free over the rural landscape, where they could swim in the nearby creek. He didn’t say that he missed driving them up to the shop with him and letting them sleep in the corner while he repaired the boats and pulled apart old engines. He didn’t say any of it because he loved her and couldn’t bear to see how desperately she wanted him to be happy in their new life and struggled to accommodate his carping attitude.

“Now just one more thing,” Molly said with a grin, clearly pleased with herself thus far and holding up two fingers.

Will stepped out of the kitchen and headed for the door on the opposite side of the room. Inside was their new bedroom, already furnished with a brand new king-sized bed, neatly made up with fresh cotton sheets that Will could smell were slightly scented with rosemary. Dusk’s final breaths of light seeped in through the windows and illuminated the bedding in a rosy glow.

“What do you think?” Molly asked hopefully, coming up from behind him and wrapping her arms around his chest.

“Well,” Will exhaled with a sneaky grin as he turned to face her, “I _do_ like the bed.”

Molly caught on quickly and her smile quickly came to mirror his. “How about we break it in?”

She squealed in delight as he heaved her up in his arms and threw her back down on the bed, where she bounced a couple of times on the new mattress springs. Their coats were off in a flash, then Will was on the bed, pulling his shirt over his head and crawling up Molly’s body with a playful smile. The bed felt different, springier and softer, but the rest was all familiar: same skin, same body, same wife. They entangled so easily, like moths instinctively following the luminosity of a crackling fire and dancing around the orange flames together. Will’s mouth found hers. His fingers traced every bump and curve that he’d traced thousands of times before, knowing every freckle and birthmark by touch alone. He stripped off his briefs hurriedly and she moaned as he thrust inside her, their hips meeting in a wave of pleasure. It felt so good, like he’d never left home. He started up a rhythm and she threw her head back, allowing him to place delicate kisses all along her jawline while she giggled.

“Wait,” she gasped, and Will immediately paused, still inside her. “I don’t think I ever closed the front door!”

“We’ll close it later,” Will groaned, moving back in to kiss her but she turned her face away.

“No, nope, I cannot have sex knowing anyone could just walk in at any minute.”

“I can.”

“Then you’ll be doing it by yourself,” she refuted glibly as she moved to get up.

“Come on…” Will moaned, burying his face into her neck and kissing sloppily down the soft skin to her collarbone which he nipped gently, glancing back up at her to gauge her mood. He moved his hips slightly and she broke into a grin.

“Okay, okay, but we should keep it down. Don’t want to attract any unnecessary attention,” she said in a hushed voice.

“Of course not,” Will said, then slid one hand round the back of her neck, cradling her head and pulling her in for a long, deep kiss. “You know, I love you, right,” he breathed onto her lips, his eyelids fluttering shut as she wrapped her legs around his waist and pulled him deeper inside of her.

“I know.”

That night, Will dreamt of swimming in the Chesapeake Bay in the moonlight. He dreamt of silently drowning and dying only to be reborn into warm and dazzling sunlight. But it was hot. So hot that he awoke in a sweat and had to climb out of bed, still naked, to get a glass of water. He padded across the oak floors, glancing out the window and seeing only the white squares of light from the windows of nearby buildings and no stars, as he headed for the kitchen. They glowed eerily in the night like hundreds and hundreds of eyes watching him.

When he’d arrived in his new kitchen and searched through all the cupboards, he realised unhappily that there weren’t any glasses, so turned on the tap and let the water run cold before dipping his head over the sink and opening his mouth into the stream of water. It ran into his parched mouth and down his throat, bringing him cool relief. As he drank, he almost felt as if something was there with him, breathing in synchronisation, drinking from his water. The feeling was familiar and reminded him of when he was much younger, a lurking presence constantly at his back. He immediately dismissed the feeling, the same way he always did when he felt a soft breeze on his neck, a muscle randomly twitch, a murmur from somewhere in the room. It had been 17 years and he was just imagining it.

So he went back to bed.

The next day he woke up alone. Molly was already out, stocking up on food and other necessities. He took the time to examine the flat without his wife watching him like a hawk from behind the entire time. First he tried out the shower and had to admit that it was a lot nicer than his one at home. The steam seemed to permeate his head and clear his thoughts, like a hot mug of water with honey and lemon, which Molly always made for him when he had a cold. She mothered him in a way and he knew that. He certainly didn’t mind it. She was fiercely maternal and that was one of the things he loved about her, since he’d previously always been with people who he felt he had to protect and take care of rather than the other way around.

After getting out of the shower, he wrapped a towel around his waist and examined himself in the mirror. It was slowly fogging up but he watched as his reflection became obscured and then disappeared into the mist.

He felt a cool breeze on the back of his neck and his skin prickled.

That was odd.

Then he could have sworn that he felt a hand, grasping at his leg, like a corpse pulling itself out of a shallow grave in some classic horror film. He kicked his leg, ignored it.

He noticed that he didn’t have a toothbrush or any toothpaste, so he went back into the bedroom and pulled yesterday’s briefs on.

Back in the kitchen, he went hunting for food, trying to recall if he’d seen any in the pantry yesterday. He pulled back the door and peeked at the empty room. His stomach growled.

_“Check the fridge.”_

Will leapt about a foot in the air. Without thinking twice, he jumped inside the pantry and slammed the door behind him.

He needed a dark, small space to gather himself together, calm down. He was under a lot of stress. That was all.

“Who are we hiding from?” a cold voice whispered into his ear.

Will slammed the palms of his hands against the side of his head and cried out.

“Did you miss me?” it snarled, past his fingers and right into his ear, filling his skull with its unnerving speech.

Horrified, Will cried out and collapsed to the floor, holding his head in his hands and silently weeping in fear. His body curled in on itself, like a crab retreating back into its shell, intuitively defending its soft core from the perils of the world. He shut down in a split second, flooded with memories he’d tried so hard to repress all spiralling throughout his mind.

Molly found him like that when she returned an hour later.

“Oh my god, Will,” she said in a hushed voice, falling to her knees, and embracing him from where he was curled up in the pantry. “Oh my god, are you okay?” She pulled back his hands from where they still clutched at his ears and pulled his face into her hands, staring frantically into his blank eyes, trying to read him.

She didn’t know. She could never know. Not ever.

“I’m… I’m fine. I just… I had a panic attack,” he stammered, not at all certain just how dishonest he was being.

“A panic attack?” she cried, pulling him close and planting a kiss on his hair, which was damp with sweat. “Will, if I knew you were feeling like this, I—”

Will shook his head and started trying to get up, but his limbs were all shaky, so he fell back to the floor, shaking his head aggressively.

“No, I was fine last night. Really. I… don’t know what came over me.” He couldn’t look at her and lie. He could obfuscate the questions surrounding his past, but he couldn’t flat out lie to her while looking into her eyes. “Can you just get me a drink, please?”

He heard her open her mouth and she started to say something, a bubble of speech at the tip of her tongue, but she cut herself short and simply huffed out a long breath before standing up and returning a minute later without anything in her hands.

“I’m sorry,” she said quietly, sitting back down next to him and taking his hand in hers, “I forgot to buy glasses.”

Will shook his head and gave her a reserved smile. “It’s okay. Did you buy beer?”

“I did.”

He pulled himself to his feet finally and held out a hand to her. “Let’s have a beer, then.”

She took his hand tentatively, still unsure of how she should be treating him, how to touch him and speak to him. That’s why he didn’t want her to know. He didn’t want to be the broken china doll, the fragile teacup. He led her back out of the pantry to the fridge, where they both grabbed a bottle of beer, which Will offered to open with his teeth in the lack of a bottle opener. They sipped their drinks, half-chilled, from the bottle and sat in silence on their only chairs.

“I hate to bring this up, Will,” Molly sighed eventually, “because I know you’ll hate me for it… But do you think it would be a good idea to see a therapist.”

“No. No way. I don’t need to be psychoanalysed.”

“Not to be psychoanalysed, just to talk to someone who isn’t me. You need that. _I_ need that. And one of the women I work with gave me the number of a really good one. I have his business card somewhere…” She started rummaging around in her handbag, but Will only pursed his lips and shook his head defiantly.

“I’m fine, Molly. Please. Don’t.” His words had an edge of finality. This was the end of the conversation. But Molly always had a way of getting through to him somehow.

She looked down into her hands and let out a long sigh that made Will’s heart tighten in his chest. “For me?” she begged gently, before looking at him with pleading eyes.

Will was immediately defeated. “Okay, one session. For you.”

She searched through her bag and pulled out her purse, leafing through it to draw out a crisp, ivory-coloured business card.

“Dr. Hannibal Lecter…” Will read aloud from the tidy copperplate writing, feeling the name roll neatly off his tongue.

“He’s really good, someone told me. He’s really well-respected amongst psychiatrists and published in loads of medical journals.” She was really trying to sell him. “Just one session, Will. I’ll pay for it, I just want you to be happy and… healthy.”

Sane, she meant sane.

“Don’t worry, I’ll go,” Will acquiesced, placing the card on the table in front of him and letting his gaze trace over the name.

_Hannibal Lecter.  
_

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This will be the final chapter without Hannibal in it. One taste of Will and Hannibal is pretty hooked, but can we blame him?
> 
> Special thanks to everyone who commented, left kudos or bookmarked :) Seriously, it fills me with love.


	5. The Creation of Adam

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a mention of child abuse.
> 
> I have also never been to a psychiatrist, nor do I know much about psychiatry in general. What occurs between Hannibal and Will in their sessions is very much a fictionalised (and probably very inappropriate) interpretation of therapy.

Will’s doubts over the events that had unfolded that day were mounting as he came closer and closer to his appointment with Dr. Hannibal Lecter. The more time that passed, the more he started to question what had really happened that day. Time muddied his memories with its obscure mists which grew thicker by the hour, by the day; words were altered and details were lost. His mental filing system was malfunctioning.

He agonised over the thought that he my have just imagined the whole thing. Since then, he hadn’t heard or felt anything. Stressed and tired, he may have started hallucinating due to a high fever. He did remember being particularly hot and thirsty the night before…

Regardless, his reasons for showing up at Hannibal Lecter’s office that Thursday evening had a lot less to do with his desire to solve the mystery of his mental companion and a lot more to do with keeping Molly happy. She’d offered to drive him there, but he preferred that she be kept out of the whole ordeal. Will wanted to spare her the trouble of getting involved with matters of his mental health. Black and sticky, it was a viscid tar pit that longed to pull in victims, but he wouldn’t let anyone else join him, so he hollered warnings to passers-by from inside the sticky prison. But Hannibal was a psychiatrist. Excavating difficult minds was his job. Will would allow him to take the risk.

So he got in his car and made the 20-minute-long drive into the city by himself, a foreigner navigating a strange new city in his ugly, out-of-place truck. He felt the pedestrians gawking at him in the bizarre night-world that was Baltimore at dusk, deficient of sunlight but hideously illuminated by streetlight orange and neon glow. Hooded figures swooped into alleyways and black-suited business men kept their eyes averted. Will was an alien to it all as he drove down the streets in his metal spaceship.

On the way, he made a list of topics to be kept taboo throughout the evening and at the very top of the list was the Voice. Wil believed that if he could make it through an hour-long session without arousing any suspicion of having a mental illness or being unstable in anyway, then he could return to Molly with a fine report of health and figure out his problems all by himself.

Entering the building itself was a struggle for Will. His stomach turned again and again as he hesitated by the front door, imagining the voice from the phone hurling psychological conditions at him in a detached voice. He’d never considered it before, but he might have always had a slight phobia of doctors. He hadn’t visited his GP in years and flossed 3 times a day as an excuse to avoid ever making a dentist’s appointment. Now he was required to bear his soul for one of them, a part of himself that discomfited him far more than anything physical.

“You can say as much as you want to, Will,” Molly had reminded him that morning as she at a carton of milk down on the table in front of him, “and you can leave out as much as you want to. He won’t force anything out of you.”

Suddenly, visions of a hand forcing its way down his throat as he choked and gurgled, extracting all of his grimy secrets and pulling them out through his teeth.

Wordlessly, Will had taken the milk and poured it generously over a bowl of high-fibre cereal. That was the end of the discussion. He tried not to feel betrayed by her lack of faith in him.

Finally, Will gathered the courage to enter the building and head up the stairs to the waiting room. He checked his watch for the time and realised he was 10 minutes late, so he fretfully walked over to the door and prepared to knock, but it swung open as if the Doctor had read his mind from the other side, though he appeared to lay eyes on Will with a look of mild surprise. After just a fraction of a second of looking taken aback, Hannibal Lecter then smiled and held the door open graciously.

“Will Graham, I assume?” he asked as Will prudently entered the man’s office and was immediately struck by its subtle grandeur and serene atmosphere. It felt less like a therapist’s office and more like a film set. He almost expected to see a lion’s head mounted above the fireplace, or see one of the bookcases pulled back to reveal a secret doorway behind it. Either way, it was more like a majestic fantasy realm than the cold and clinical atmosphere he has been expected.  A fire burned away from behind the desk and cast the room in its warm, transmundane light.

“Yes,” Will answered casually, disguising his anxiety and turning back to get a proper look at his new psychiatrist. “We spoke on the phone.”

From the rich and sophisticated foreign accent he’d heard, Will had been expecting an older man, with maybe a beard or a bit of a belly. However, Hannibal appeared to be younger than expected (though still older than Will) and in fine shape, in a well-tailored 3-piece suit the colour of a dark wine. Though Will’s first thought upon studying him was that even if this was their one and only session and he left that night never to see Hannibal again, he wouldn’t ever forget that face. He had to have the most strangely distinctive set of facial features that Will had ever seen on a man before. Observing him in the muted tones of his office, Will was struck by what Hannibal Lecter might look like lit by the cabalistic moonlight, surrounded by a blizzard of ice. He looked as if he was born on a stormy night in the middle of Summer, whatever that meant.

But Will tried not to stare, instead lingering awkwardly by one of the leather armchairs and staring coyly at his shoes until Hannibal offered to take his jacket. Having handed it over, Hannibal then went to hang it up on a hook by the door and told Will to take a seat.

“So where do we start?” Will asked as he tried to keep his tone devoid of nervous impatience.

“The beginning seems as good a place as any, wouldn’t you agree?” Hannibal replied, taking the seat opposite him and reclining naturally into his chair with a notebook balanced on his knee and a pen in one hand. Will eyed the notepad nervously and Hannibal must have immediately noticed, because he put the lid back on the pen and tucked it into his jacket pocket.

“I’m not entirely sure where my beginning lies.” Will answered after a brief silence, deciding to make his answers honest if also mildly evasive.

“What about your parents?”

“Nothing much to say. I didn’t know my mother.”

“Weren’t you ever curious about her?"

“Not particularly. I don’t even know what she looked like. I never romanticised her, either. I knew enough kids with terrible mothers to know that I was probably better off never knowing mine.” Will thought back to one girl who came to the children’s home when he was 15. She had one eye constantly welded shut and she never smiled. A rumour passed around that her mother had gouged out her eye with her fingernails but Will was never sure if he believed it or not. He still thought about it, though. 

“Didn’t your father ever talk to you about her?”

“My father, little that I do remember, wasn’t the talkative type.”

“I take it you weren’t particularly close, then?”

Will felt the now barely-visible scars on his back start to itch. He let out a slight laugh, monosyllabic and dry. “No, we weren’t. I spent most of my childhood in care.” The psychiatrist remained silent, waiting for Will to delve deeper into that particular psychological trauma, but Will waited a beat before indulging the other man and, even then, just slightly. “He was abusive. Broke my arm when I was 6 and I never saw him again.” Will tried not to flinch as he said the words and tried not to recall the pain, both his corporal and immaterial sufferings; tried not to relive it all over again as he so easily could. He kept it stored deep in the recesses of his mind, untouchable.

“Do you ever consider getting back in touch?”

“Not an option at this point. He died a couple of years back. Alcohol poisoning. He wasn’t an alcoholic when I was a child, but I suppose I could have just not noticed. I was observant, but too young to understand a lot of things.” Will’s voice was calm and detached, but he knew it was forced. He remembered struggling to hold back tears when he got the phone call and he remembered how his voice broke when he refused to attend. In the years since, he tried not to think about whether anyone came at all because he likely knew what the answer would be. “It’s too long ago now for me to remember any of the details. Sometimes I wonder if my memories are really accurate or if I’ve just run them through my head so many times that they’ve become all misshapen and distorted and now they’re only memories of memories of memories. I only know some things for sure because they left a permanent mark.” To demonstrate his meaning, Will undid the top button of his shirt and pulled it back to reveal a round, pink patch of skin on his collarbone that didn’t quite blend in with the rest of his skin. “This is the only kiss my father ever gave me.”

The scar stung as the words left Will’s mouth. Hannibal looked briefly at the mark, then back up to Will’s face and read him perfectly: “He feared intimacy, while you craved it.”

“He was my father. When I do think about him, I try to think about the good times, rather than the bad.” But honestly, Will just tried not to think about him at all.

“What were the good times?”

Will thought immediately of the boating lake, forever soured by trying to drown Bethany there. He couldn’t claim his oldest memories there as _good_ ever since. “It’s all so blurry, but I remember there was a time before…” Before the Voice, before that night his father hit him and he ran away and returned as a different boy. This new boy had an ugly conjoined twin suddenly sticking out of him, born from his own flesh and taking shape right beside him. If his twin died when he was 13, Will was still lugging around his dead body. “Before my father became abusive, he bought us a gramophone from a flea market in Prairieville. It was cheap but it looked so strange and fancy, he was just taken by it. It must have been taller than I was at the time and we barely managed to find a place to put it. He warned me to be extra careful around it, because he was worried I’d break it and he was probably right to be nervous. I was always breaking things.” Will looked down into his lap to hide the shy smile that came out when he thought about his clumsy younger self, the rare and scattered memories he had of falling over his own feet constantly. Every slip and fall was so inconsequential and full of innocence. “He put it up on this high dresser that I couldn’t reach. Trouble was we didn’t have any records to play on it, so he went out and bought the cheapest one he could find and that was the only one we ever owned, so it just got played on repeat and those were really the only songs I knew as a small child. We’d always listen to it together. Whenever I hear that album now, I’m back there with my dad. Back when I was…” Will had to search for the right word to describe the feeling, like the first gulp of hot coffee in the morning, when it spreads throughout your chest like glowing ichor, life filling your veins. Finally, Will finished: “I was content.”

“It sounds like a beautiful memory, Will.”

“I hope so — I don’t have many. My childhood was mostly made up of Cimmerian corners and mocking whispers, the feeling of being unwanted and unloved.”

“Why do you think that was?”

 _The Voice_.

“I guess because I didn’t talk much,” Will lied, turning his face down to hide his deceit. He berated himself for lying to a man who was paid to not judge him, not call him a freak. He could so easily tell him, share his dirty secret. “It got better in my teenage years.”

“Tell me about your teenage years then. Any big changes?”

“Not exactly. I was still at the children’s home, right up until I was 18. But it was just _different_.”

“Young love?” Hannibal smiled at him with slightly raised eyebrows and flashes of all of Will’s lovers’ faces passed through his mind in reverse, starting with Molly and finally settling on his very first.

“Not really,” Will chuckled. “There was one girl… We grew up together at the home. Her name was Bethany.”

“Childhood sweethearts, then?”

Will snorted. “No, not at all. We hated each other until I was 13.”

“When everything changed?”

“That was… coincidental. I, uh, saved her life one time. I guess after that our feelings towards each other just changed.” Will paused, then rushed to finish, clarifying, “But it wasn’t really love. I felt responsible for her and she felt gratitude towards me. We confused it for something it wasn’t.”

“And she felt the same?”

“I think she knew deep down. But we were together for a long time. It’s difficult to end something that feels doomed anyway. You just keep waiting for it to self-destruct, apprehensive to go and finish it yourself in case you get caught in the explosion,” Will sighed, remembering the first time he kissed her and the last time he saw her cry. He thought about how he traced the scars he left her over and over and apologised until his throat was raw. And she was feisty but vulnerable and he was the only person in the world who was allowed to see both those sides to her. He wondered who was allowed to see both of those sides to her now. He wondered where she was and if she was happy.

“Tell me more about how you saved her life.”

Will’s face flushed and his thoughts stumbled — they kept falling into caliginous places that he swore he’d never visit. Now all he could see was Bethany’s corpse sinking and the blood pouring from her head, staining the water red like some sort of Stygian nightmare. “Oh, uh, it was nothing really. I mean, anyone in my situation would have done the same.”

“But it wasn’t anyone, Will. It was you. Tell me.” It was a command, but Hannibal’s voice was soft and gently prying, making it sound more like an earnest imploration. Will found himself bizarrely charmed by this Doctor and his face carved out of candle wax and his eyes set with sombre jewels that sparkled with a clairvoyant mysticism. Will didn’t typically subscribe to the supernatural, but Hannibal’s eyes seemed to be laying him bare with some sort of psychic power and he was scared to lie to him, though of course he did anyway.

“Some local kids followed us out to the lake and knocked her out then pushed her in. I only jumped in and pulled her out. She forgot all of it though, so I told her what happened. We kept it quiet.” Will begged her not to tell anyone. Thinking that he was her knight in shining armour, she must have felt oblige to obey. His lies were gospel in her head. His lies changed fate and damaged lives. “She realised the next day that she’d lost her necklace, so I went back and got it for her. I gave it back to her and… and she kissed me.” Will was blushing again as he recalled the memory. He never forgot a first kiss, but he felt like he knew when he first kissed Molly that it would be his last. All his other kisses seemed dull in comparison. Nevertheless, he still remembered the first rush of passion, the hammering of his heart inside his chest, the sweatiness of his palms. That was a nice memory, he kept it near to the forefront of his mind and revisited it often.

“Must have been quite the shock.” Hannibal smiled at him, seeing how Will replayed the moment over in his mind. He appeared to be carefully studying Will’s every facial expression and hand movement as if he needed to decipher him like an old text.

“I was a 13-year-old boy. I honestly didn’t care,” Will laughed.

“Then you met your wife at some point?” Will wasn’t caught off-guard by Hannibal’s knowledge, remembering that Molly asked to speak to him when they made the appointment, name-dropping her colleague Alana Bloom who was apparently a good friend.

“That wasn’t until I was 25, when I met Molly. I had a few other partners before her, but nothing serious. Just a few women and a couple of men who passed through.” Will no longer felt embarrassed to admit his attraction to men. It wasn’t something he would typically divulge without being asked, but there was no shame in it, he’d realised. It particularly didn’t seem to matter now, with Molly holding his entire future. “My wife and I have been together for five whole years. Never been happier.”

“Yet she was the one who suggested you try therapy. Does she have good reason to be concerned about your mental health?”

“Possibly. It’s a big change for me, coming here.” Will had to downplay the stress he felt over the huge, sweeping change. He didn’t want his supposed problems to all be reduced to a side effect of the upheaval.

“And why are you coming here?”

“Money. She has a good job offer. I wasn’t making anything substantial repairing boats back in Virginia. It was only really a Summer business anyway,” Will admitted glumly, recalling a time when his only dream in life was to repair boats by the riverside and swim with his dogs. He still fantasised about it, but his priorities had changed to include Molly and her dreams in life required moving to Baltimore.

“But it still upsets you,” Hannibal assessed neatly.

“Of course. I built that business from the ground up. But I agreed to support her and I do. Doesn’t mean it’s not hard, though.”

“She wants you to be happy. That’s why she sent you to me.”

“I know. She’s always trying to do the right thing. She teaches underprivileged children and teens English skills, you know. Tries to make sure they can make their way in the world, aren’t held back by circumstance.” Will beamed. He was proud of his wife, changing the world for the better in a way he never could.

“Perhaps the type of person you wish you’d been introduced to as a child?”

“Maybe.” Will kept his answer succinct. He wasn’t willing to delve into what that said about his relationship, his desire for a maternal love, his lack of childhood attachment. He’d flicked through a John Bowlby book once before and didn’t like its implications. Hannibal sensed his trepidation and didn’t press him any further, but moved onto another subject that made Will vaguely uncomfortable.

“Any children planned?”

“Molly would like children, but she knows I couldn’t be a father.”

“You don’t think you’d be any good?”

Will ran the question through his mind a couple of times before slowly answering, “Not something I’m willing to risk.”

“Your childhood seems to have affected you much more than you want to believe,” Hannibal concluded. Will laughed dryly.

“Believe me, I’m very aware of the scars childhood left me with. It was like a sharp blade that I had to force away from my chest, but my hands got all cut up in the process.” Will acted out his words with his own hands briefly, struggling to draw an imaginary dagger away from his chest, then he stopped suddenly and looked at his open palms as if expecting to see them run red with blood.

“And you don’t want to expose that same blade to your children,” Hannibal surmised thoughtfully and Will put his hands back to rest lightly on his thighs, perturbed when he didn’t felt the sticky wetness of the blood seeping through his trousers.

“Precisely.”

“And I’m afraid,” Hannibal announced, with a quick glance down at his watch, “that’s all we have time for. Though of course, we may be able to cover slightly more next week, _if_ you arrive on time.” Hannibal’s words were pointed, but not necessarily penalising, as if he was expressing forgiveness for Will’s rudeness given what he had shared that session. He stood and walked over to the hanger by the door to get Will’s coat for him. “That is, if you are coming again next week?” Hannibal came to stand next to the chair where Will still sat, buzzing from the experience. He hadn’t even shared his dark secrets, but his brain felt as if it had been combed through until it was raw and bleeding out of his ears. It wasn’t that he’d never spoken about these things before, but having it all diluted down into less than an hour-long conversation seemed to intensify it.

Urging himself to stand, Will asked, “What makes you think that I won’t come again next week?”

Hannibal stepped directly in front of him, forcing Will to look right at his face and they both seemed to vehemently study each other simultaneously, like they were searching for something specific in the other’s face: a blemish that had been disguised by thick make-up, or a twitching muscle that betrayed a lie.

“Will, I don’t want to force you to do anything you’re not comfortable with. But if you’re not entirely honest with me, then I can’t help you. You’re holding back.” Hannibal let the truth of his admonition linger between them while his gaze roamed up and down Will’s expression. He calmly continued, “I want to help ease you into a more comfortable position before you snap.”

“I’ll make another appointment,” Will yielded, far more willingly than he had anticipated, and earned a small smile from Hannibal in return.

“Good. I hope you’ll be more open with me next time, more relaxed.” Hannibal handed him his coat as he said this and their fingers touched briefly. There was a _something_ , like a crackle or a spark; a single drop of water plunging into hot oil. Will felt the sweet sting of redemption in that touch; he was Adam reaching out to the hand of God and erupting into existence at the moment of contact. The universe around them bellowed silently as it expanded and contracted instantaneously, all due to that minor touch. _Creation._

Hannibal Lecter was going to save him. He knew it then. As he looked up into Hannibal’s dark, entrancing eyes, he believed that Hannibal knew it too.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> First off, I am supremely grateful for comment, kudos and bookmarks. I do it all for you ;) x
> 
> Secondly, thank you for your patience in getting through 11,000 words thus far without so much as an appearance from Hannibal. Well folks, he's here to stay from this point onwards.


	6. Anchoring A Kite

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mention of rape and graphic violence.

Will heard Molly getting out of bed just after sunrise, leaving the other side of the mattress cold in her absence, but he allowed himself to drift back into his dreams nonetheless. He was at a party on a boat, greeting strangers and friends who all knew his name and kept complimenting him on his face. He saw Bethany pass through the crowd, her forehead gaping open to reveal the bone underneath and a river of blood flowing from the open wound. Crimson cascaded down her face, dripping into her eyelids and along the curve of her cheek all the way to her jawline. She was holding hands with the one-eyed girl and caught Will’s eye, smiling distantly at him. He smiled back. After his therapy session with Dr. Lecter, he found himself dreaming more and more about people from his childhood and they would randomly appear, looking as they did 17 years ago.

Will wasn’t sure if he was entirely happy with his involuntary visitation of the past. Hannibal seemed to have gotten a hand inside his filing cabinet and was pulling out memories at random, tossing the papers into the air and letting them rain down chaotically over Will’s once-organised headspace. Despite this, Will was eager to see him again. He had a certain soothing effect that Will couldn’t quite place his finger on, but he reasoned that even if the Voice wasn’t really back, seeing Hannibal would still be a good idea to sort out lingering damage from his early years. Hannibal could hold his hand, tie him back to reality as he ventured into the tar pit, trying to recover lost memories that he was too frightened to search for all alone. He’d tie a rope around his waist and give the other end to Hannibal to hold, trusting that he would hold on tight.

It was a Thursday morning as Will lay peacefully alone in bed. He would be seeing Hannibal again later that day. It felt like a deadline; a goalpost that he’d been heading towards for the entire week and he was thankful to be finally meeting it.

His vision was blurry as his eyes blinked open, not too long after he’d heard the front door close. They still hadn’t fitted any curtains or blinds, so Will was awoken by the harsh sunlight as it crept into the sky and penetrated the bedroom windows. He moaned and rolled over to bury his face back into his pillow.

“Thank God we’re finally alone,” he heard, unexpectedly.

Will sat up sharply, glancing around. He knew deep down, however, that whatever had just spoken had no physical form and would not be spotted. He already knew what was coming, like the victim of sleep paralysis who suddenly awoke to find that they were immobilised and saw a dark shadow begin creeping up from the foot of the bed. Will knew he would be equally as helpless as if he was paralysed. There is no way to run from the parasite that leeches onto your back and feeds off of your fear. Where ever he ran, it would follow.

Tears began to brim and he blinked forcefully to push them back down. He would just pay it no mind, he thought.

“You can’t ignore me,” it whispered, “you know you can’t ignore me.”

Will screwed his eyes tightly shut and collapsed back down onto the bed, pulling the pillow over his ears to muffle out any sound. Yet he still heard the Voice’s sinister crooning as it trickled down into his head from everywhere and nowhere. He longed to be back to the boat, throwing a party, taking compliments.

“I’ve missed you, Will. You’ve been busy while I was gone. You found _some cunt_ to replace me.”

Will jerked violently at the mention of Molly, terrified at what it might have Will do to her. The image of Bethany smiling at him through the cataract of blood made his chest ache.

He kept telling himself that it was just all in his head. None of it was real. He’d looked it up before, pored through Google and medical textbooks trying to find mental illnesses that fit the description. Multiple personalities, psychosis, paranoid schizophrenia — none of them quite seemed to match his symptoms. Regardless, he knew that it had to be some sort of auditory hallucination paired with sensory phantasm. But it was nevertheless disheartening to find that the closest description of his symptoms was a report of a bad trip on acid. Though he was no spiritualist. He knew that the answer wasn’t poltergeists or demonic possession or whatever non-sceptics may theorise. The simplest explanation was that it was all psychological.

But a part of Will wanted to believe that this thing was a separate entity entirely, because the opposite conclusion would mean that it was him. It was all him. He hated that idea more than he hated defying Occam’s razor, so as much as he tried to employ logic and science, he never let himself be entirely convinced. Again and again, his mind drifted to thoughts of the supernatural.

All of a sudden, there were hands on top of his, trying to pull them away from his head, trying to peel back his eyelids. Will could feel the nails digging into the skin, scratching at his eyeballs and piercing into his irises. He screamed in pain and pulled his hands from his ears to swipe at it, but to no avail. It was like trying to fight the wind, when it could so easily knock him back in a wild gale. There wasn’t a level playing field and there never had been.

Writhing in agony, he gripped his own face and dragged his fingernails down his skin as his eyes were ripped open and his vision was unceremoniously flooded with burning white light.

Then as soon as it had materialised, the feeling was gone. The hands at his face were his own and his eyes did not sting with pain, though something else did.

Will was breathing heavily.

Aghast, he felt blood running down his cheeks and into his hairline, then there was the searing agony of a wound as he realised he’d slashed open the skin on his face with his own fingernails.

Finally, the tears came and when they came they nearly drowned him.

~

Will couldn’t bear to see Molly in his state when she got home from work, so he left for his session with Hannibal 3 hours early, though when he got there he cursed himself and realised he couldn’t linger in Hannibal Lecter’s waiting room for however many hours and however many patients to pass through and stare at him in astonishment. Gather round, check out the freak.

The cuts weren’t deep and would likely heal up in a week or so, but they were fairly noticeable, having not yet scabbed over. Instead they just pulsated with fresh flesh and dried, black blood. Will rolled down the window and studied his face in the side mirror as he sat in his car, parked directly outside Hannibal’s building. There were 6 narrow lacerations, 3 on each side, starting just at his cheekbones and each about an inch long. He looked hideous, like he’d been in some kind of extraordinary accident with a rake.

Groaning, Will let his head fall against the steering wheel, so he didn’t notice when Hannibal approached his car a couple of minutes later. Reacting to a sharp knock on the window, Will sat up suddenly and blushed bright red when he saw Hannibal peering in at him. He also didn’t miss the slight look of shock when Hannibal saw his mutilated face. Embarrassed, Will managed to roll down the window and smile sheepishly at his psychiatrist. But when the glass separating them had disappeared and they were breathing in the same air, Will was relieved to note that there still appeared to be an electric current leaping between them, a magnetic pulsation that was palpable in the air.

“Hello, Will. I know I asked you to make sure you were on time this week, but I think you may be a little _too_ early,” he said, with a degree of humour in his tone, but also a fair amount of concern.

“I’m sorry,” Will exhaled, “I just didn’t know where else to go.”

When Will looked up at the man with dejected, pleading eyes, he saw that Hannibal reacted to it and his face softened with something other than pity that he couldn’t quite pl. Hannibal stood back and looked at his watch, frowning. “I was just about to get a late lunch, but you can come in and converse now if you’d like.”

“Oh no, I couldn’t ask you to do that,” Will said, but secretly yearned to be able to talk to him. The situation felt oddly biblical, like a beggar kneeling at the feet of a righteous king, supplicating to his ascendency. Will wondered, if he were a religious man, would this be a priest that he may have sought out? Would he be confessing his sins in a dark booth to a thin grate and counting “Hail Mary”s? Perhaps therapy was his religion, Hannibal was his God.

“Your well-being is more important to me than filling my stomach. Come inside.”

The words ignited a warmth in Will’s chest, like they had just thrown kindling onto the dying flame that powered his heart. It was a familiar but infrequent feeling for Will: the soft touch of genuine affection, like a comforting hand on his shoulder or a heartfelt smile. He sensed a radiating fondness seep from Hannibal’s words and knew that his therapist was honestly worried for him, therefore sacrificing his own time and comfort to nurture him.

While it was exactly the thing Will needed at that time, recognising it made him feel unstable, like he had been falling for an eternity but hadn’t quite realised until somebody reached out and grabbed him. The constant freefall had become natural to him and the sudden lack of it was noticeable, but he allowed himself to fall and allowed himself to be caught by Hannibal in that moment because it relieved him from the pressure of having to hide it all from Molly. She shouldn’t have to take on the responsibility of being his saviour. She mothered him enough already. He could leave the rest to Hannibal to deal with. Will knew that Hannibal was going to be the one to save him since their session last week and this moment appeared to be confirming that knowledge.

So Will suddenly felt safe enough to relinquish to Hannibal a part of himself that he had never divulged to another living soul: the truth.

They went sombrely up to Hannibal’s office, where Will anxiously sat back down in the same chair he had 1 week earlier, but Hannibal did not yet sit. Instead, he crouched in front of Will and studied the gashes running down his cheeks.

“Are you going to tell me how you did that to your face?” Hannibal pressed gently, while Will avidly avoided having to make eye contact with him.

“It’s a long story,” he eventually sighed, “but I’ll try to explain.” Now he had become mentally committed to unloading his secret, he wasn’t about to be diverted from his plan. He was running towards a cliff, gathering momentum to jump over a petrifying abyss and he wasn’t about to be slowed down and miss the other side.

“Do you mind…?” Hannibal asked, reaching out to try to touch his face but Will automatically jerked away. With Will, all touch had to be earnt. Hannibal immediately understood and pulled back, then stood up, and quickly recovered by saying, “You know, I used to be surgeon. Saving lives was my job.” He paused. “It still is, I suppose. Now I operate on minds instead of bodies.”

Will needed it to be his job. He needed Hannibal to save him, before it was too late. He needed his mind to be dissected and the cancerous intruder to be removed by Hannibal’s own deft surgeon’s hands.

Hannibal sat down, this time without any notebook and looked at Will expectantly. “I’m listening, Will.”

Suddenly Will was speechless. He’d never thought how to articulate his problem. Telling anyone had never occurred to him before and he was all of a sudden struck by how insane he must sound. Again, he could envisage Hannibal listing off diagnoses and disorders mechanically, then sending him home with bottles and bottles of medication, declaring him officially insane. The word ‘psychotic’ kept coming up again and again in his mind like a merciless jibe. Will’s mouth opened then closed a couple of times, before he decided to start at the beginning.

“It all started when I was a child. It was after my father hit me— for the first time, that is. I ran away to hide and…” Will wavered, frightened to see Hannibal’s reaction. His gaze was fixed firmly on his hands, which twisted uncomfortably in his lap as he fought to get the words out. “And I heard this voice in my head and I felt these hands and I…” Will looked up to see Hannibal watching him intently, but he didn’t look disgusted or shocked. He looked more intrigued than anything. “It started telling me to do things, sometimes it forced me to… I know it sounds crazy.”

Even as Will admitted it, he knew that Hannibal wouldn’t accuse him of insanity. But in that moment, he needed to hear him say it. Hannibal now held a piece of Will that had been lost for years, buried under layers and layers of thick scar tissue. Yet there Hannibal was with it in the palm of his hand, holding it up to the light to study and analyse. Now that he had it, Will knew he was forever tethered to his care whether he wanted to be or not and was thankful that he knew he could trust this Doctor with that duty. He could be assured that Hannibal would take care of him.

“Abnormal, yes. Not necessarily crazy,” Hannibal assured him and Will felt a small weight lift off him. “What sort of things did it tell you to do?” Hannibal probed, his eyes not leaving Will’s face for even a fraction of a second.

“It told me to stand up to my father, to the other children at the home. It also wanted me to take things or destroy them. It wanted me to be strong, I think. _‘We’re going to look out for one another’_ , that’s what it said to me.” Just reciting the words brought Will back to the lonely creek on that night when the moon tried to protect him and failed miserably. Now he was hearing them again, from his own mouth, and praying that Hannibal would be the one to keep him safe.

“But you say you can feel it, too?”

“Is that weird?”

“It’s certainly not unheard of,” Hannibal mused. “But so far it doesn’t sound as if it was much of a danger to you.”

“No, you don’t understand. It didn’t just want me to speak up for myself or commit petty crimes. It wanted me to hurt people, burn down houses… It wanted me to kill.” Will spoke the last few words so quietly that even he could barely hear them leave his mouth, but Hannibal must have caught them because when Will looked back up at him, his face had suddenly changed. It wasn’t closed off to him as Will had feared, but there was an acknowledgement that this whole ordeal was a lot more grim than he had initially expected. “You said you’d help me, Dr. Lecter. You said you’d fix me before I snap,” Will pleaded as his voice shook.

“I promise you, Will. I am going to help you.” The words held portent and were heavy with that same genuine affection Will had felt earlier that kindled the fire behind his ribs. Will let out a choked laugh. He had found his guardian angel after all these years to cut down the devil on his shoulder.

“First, I need you to tell me the specifics.”

So Will told him all about the first time he heard the Voice and how it later followed him to the children’s home. He told Hannibal all about his crimes and sins and Hannibal listened silently and patiently. Finally, Will told him about what happened by the lake, how he almost killed Bethany and then saved her.

“And that was the last time you heard it?”

Will shook his head. “I didn’t hear it for years and years. But then it came back, the night I moved to Baltimore. I started to feel it again.”

“And did you feel it when you got those scars? Did it… do that to you?” Even Hannibal’s voice sounded doubtful as he asked it, clearly starting to doubt just how sane Will’s story was.

“No, it can’t actually touch me. I can just feel it… forcing me? I felt it on my face and I was trying to get it off.”

“It must have been quite upsetting for you, evidently.”

“I could swear, it’s like there really is something there. But of course, there isn’t.”

“Then why do you think it left when it did?”

“I thought,” Will sighed, suddenly feeling slightly embarrassed by telling Hannibal this, “that I had defeated it. It wanted me to commit murder. It wanted me to kill and I almost did, but then I saved her. I thought I must have overcome it with… _good_.” He recalled the flowering warmth that seemed to blossom when he collapsed next to Bethany and saw her chest moving up and down. He remembered feeling like Superman.  “I always doubted that I was worth anything until that moment. I climbed out of that lake and I suddenly realised I was capable of evil things, but I was also capable of doing good, being a hero.”

Hannibal hummed thoughtfully, then brought up the question that Will had been taunting himself with, but was too afraid to ask. “So what’s changed now?”

“I don’t know,” Will admitted.

“Perhaps moving away from your home has been too stressful,” Hannibal suggested. “Are you still afraid of it? Even after you bested it? Don’t you think you can defeat it again?”

“I’m not sure. I just know that as long as it’s inside me Molly isn’t safe. It will want me to hurt her.”

“How do you know that?”

Will bit his lip, then confessed, “It wasn’t just a voice in my ear, making me do bad things. We were friends, sf sorts. Sometimes I liked it and sometimes I hated it. But I still considered it my friend. For a long time, it was the only friend I had. And it didn’t like me being friends with other people.”

“Do you think that my relationship with you, no matter how impersonal, puts me at risk?” Will’s head shot up, panic in his eyes. He’d just disclosed his worst secrets to Hannibal. They were tethered. He _needed_ his help. “Don’t worry, Will. I promised I would help you, but I need to know what I’m getting myself in for.”

Will sighed again, admitting, “I honestly don’t know. It hasn’t said much to me yet, except to mock me slightly. But it’s back and I know I need to stop it before somebody gets hurt.”

“The priority would be for you to find a coping mechanism. Something to ground yourself when you feel you’re being taken over by this… demon."

“Please don’t call it that,” Will said through gritted teeth, finding the image far too frightening.

“What would you have me call it?”

“It’s just… a Voice.”

“The Voice, then. You need to find a method that either sedates it or drowns it out.”

“Good luck trying,” Will heard it snicker behind his ear and he flinched. Hannibal noticed.

“Did it just speak to you?” Will nodded. “What did it say?”

“ _Good luck trying_ ,” Will repeated, gulping slightly. Hannibal dipped his head reflectively, as if he was getting taunted by an adversary he hadn’t yet laid eyes on.

“When you were younger, did you discover any ways of coping with it, even slightly?”

“Well,” Will started, “the best way to sedate it was to do what it said. The only way I ever managed to drown it out was by singing.”

“Did you sing one of the songs that you and your father used to listen to together?”

“Always,” Will answered, remembering how he screeched the final tune when he was hiding under Bethany’s bed, clutching her jewellery box.

“Then try that,” Hannibal suggested. “But first, I want you to call me.” Hannibal got up and moved to his desk, where he grabbed a pen and his notebook and wrote something down. He ripped the page out of the notebook and handed it over to Will. “This is my personal number, Will. You can call it any time and I will pick up. When you hear it, feel it, or whenever you get frightened, call me immediately. Don’t talk to your wife, don’t talk to anyone else. Call me.”

Will took the piece of paper and clung to it like it was his own anchor, weighing him down when the stormy waters were desperately trying to pull him away.

~

Will woke up in a cold sweat. Molly slept peacefully next to him. Thankfully, she’d bought his story about getting caught in a nightmare and scratching uncontrollably at his face in his sleep, already having knowledge about his trouble with night terrors. Perhaps she was only pretending to believe him, but she touched his face with nurturing hands and kissed his cheeks delicately, making him feel safe and loved. That was all he needed from her.

“You don’t need her to make you feel safe anymore, Will,” the Voice hummed cloyingly from the pillow beside him. “ _I’m_ here now.”

Will scrambled out of bed and grabbed his phone off the bedside table before running into the bathroom and locking the door. Just as Hannibal had instructed him. It came as second nature, like Hannibal had planted a seed in Will’s mind when it was raw and vulnerable: _“Call me.”_ Will obeyed.

“Unlock the door, Will. Go to the kitchen. Get a knife,” it instructed him, coiling around his ears like a snake that had been living dormant inside his head for years and now wanted to slither out and wrap itself around his head.

His fingers trembled as he found his contact list and felt the thing on his back. He almost expected to see its dark shadow clinging onto him, its red eyes boring into him and its spindly fingers running eerily over his bare flesh when he caught a glimpse of himself in the bathroom mirror. Instead he just saw a pale ghost, damp all over with sweat and dread filling his eyes.

Quickly he found Hannibal’s number and dialled it, shaking as the phone range.

_“Get a knife from the kitchen and slit her throat.”_

“Please pick up,” Will begged through his tears while the phone rang.

_“Rape her corpse.”_

“ _Please_ ,” Will cried softly, just as he heard Hannibal on the other line.

“Hello, Will? Is that you?” he asked, his voice thick with concern. “Can you hear it?”

“It’s telling me to hurt her, Hannibal. It wants me to… to… I can’t even think about it, I—” Will blubbered, trying not to let it get to him, but he knew Molly was only in the other room. He knew that it wanted her dead and Will was weak to its commands, shivering as he held the phone tightly against his ear.

“Will, I need you to think for a second—” But Will wasn’t listening as he felt it wrapping its hands tightly around his neck, pressing down hard on his trachea as it begged him for attention.

“I… I can’t! All I can see is _her_ , and I’m… I’m…”

_“Don’t you want to know how it will feel?”_

The hands around his neck tightened and Will had to clamp a hand over his mouth to stop himself from crying out. He couldn’t let her wake up and see him in this state.

“Will, remember you told me about that record you had growing up. What was the name of it?”

_“When you cut open her flesh?”_

“What? I, uh… Songs of Leonard Cohen.”

_“When you feel the life leaving her body?”_

“Good, now what was the first song?”

_“When you fuck the dead meat?”_

Will felt bile rising in his throat and an invisible force grasped tightly at his genitals and the most atrocious images of himself doing appalling things to his wife blasted through his mind.

“Hannibal, I’m… I’m breaking! I can’t—”

_“You want it. You’ve always wanted it. Death and pain and suffering.”_

“What was the first song, Will?” Hannibal’s voice was suddenly harsh and demanding, cutting through the voice and sending Will an ounce of clarity through the sick, sadistic taunting.

“I can’t remember… I think, Suzanne? Yeah, Suzanne, I think.”

“What was the second song?”

As Will searched back through his mind to his childhood, past the trauma to the image of himself and his father, once contented to sit together and sing along to their only music, he was distracted from the hands at his neck and groin.

“Um… Master Song?”

“The third?”

_“You said you’d protect me, Will.”_

The images of rape and murder were clouded over as Will searched for the next song, hearing the mellow voice and gentle chords, the humble melody ringing through his head, louder than anything else.

“The Stranger… No wait, Winter Lady, then The Stranger Song.”

“And what came next?”

Will’s shoulders relaxed as did his grip on the phone. He no longer felt fingers gripping him; he no longer felt that he even occupied his adult body, but was instead only a couple of feet tall and curled into his father’s side.

“It was Sisters of Mercy, then turn the record over and it was… So Long, Marianne.”

“After that?”

_“But you cast me aside.”_

“Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, then Stories of the Street, then… Teachers? Yeah, Teachers. Then the last one.”

“What was it?”

 _“Who’s going to protect you now?”_ The Voice became a thin screech, climbing gradually into a howl that shook Will’s skull and made his eyes start to roll back in his head. The only remnant of reality he clung to was Hannibal’s voice.

“What was it, Will?” Hannibal demanded again.

“I can’t remember the name, it was about doctors and saints and Eskimos… But I can’t remember the name!”

“Yes, you can, Will. What was it?”

“God, it was… It was One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

Will felt like he’d broken free of something, busted through a thick layer of ice atop a frozen lake to exalt in the cool, fresh air. He didn’t need to feel afraid. He knew he would be protected still. Hannibal was going to protect him.

“Good. Now repeat them back to me.” Hannibal must have sensed his breakthrough as his voice softened, but he remained stringent and ordered Will to continue nonetheless. Will took a long breath and sank to the tiles of the bathroom floor, curling up with his knees to his chest and his head resting against the bath.

“Suzanne, Master Song, Winter Lady… The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy… So Long, Marianne… Hey, That’s No Way to Say Goodbye, Stories of the Street… Teachers… One of Us Cannot Be Wrong.”

“That’s good, Will. Again.”

Will repeated them again, made the track listing his mantra until he was back in that warm pool of calmness and content and the Voice had completely retreated. Hannibal stayed on the line the whole night until Will finally said goodbye.

“Thank you, Hannibal,” he whispered, his breathing now slow and relaxed. Hannibal’s words had managed to reach down his throat and pull open his airways, breath fresh air back into his lungs and make his heart start pumping like a living boy’s again.

“It was no problem, Will. Please don’t hesitate to call me again.” And then he hung up.

It was only when Will returned to bed that he realised something amazing had just happened. He’d never managed to sedate the Voice like that before. Never. But Hannibal managed to.

If Will was a kite slowly drifting away from reality, then Hannibal had managed to grab hold of his string and was holding on for dear life, reeling him in and anchoring him down before he became a mere speck in the distance, before he became nothing at all.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> EDIT: Re-uploading this chapter with original chapter notes because I was apparently not paying any attention last night...
> 
> Whew, this was a long one. I probably shouldn't have stayed up until 4am editing this, but it was all I could think about before I slept.
> 
> I've been listening to Leonard Cohen a lot while writing this. And since it was important to me as a writer, it became important to Will as a character. It's an interesting concept to me to have someone remember something so specific from their childhood that it's always there, like remembering all the words to a song even though you haven't heard it in ages. But that's why there's so much about childhood in here. It's left such an impression on Will, both consciously and subconsciously.
> 
> The lyrics to One of Us Cannot Be Wrong are referenced a lot through out the text, even when not explicitly in the context of the song. For example, in the previous chapter when Will "was struck by what Hannibal Lecter might look like lit by the cabalistic moonlight, surrounded by a blizzard of ice", which is him subconsciously drawing on the line "You stand there so nice in your blizzard of ice, please let me come into your storm". Also, if you were wondering why I keep mentioning mosquitoes, again, that's intentional and not just a weird obsession with mosquitoes lol. So well done if you picked up on that!
> 
> But enough rambling! Hannibal has his claws inside his vulnerable little enigma now... (Also, we're halfway! Whoo!)


	7. A Statue Casting Shadows

The clock moved unbearably slowly as the long hand drew towards the 12 and the short hand towards the 6. It was a Thursday, almost time for Will’s appointment with Hannibal and he’d been waiting not-so-patiently outside his office for a good 20 minutes. He paced up and down, then checked the clock, then continued to pace. His feet were running perpetual rings around the room, like a train on its tracks, growing used to the same pattern of walking back and forth, back and forth, while his mind raced ahead of him.

Will was well aware that Hannibal had other patients to attend to and berated himself for getting frustrated with him, but he was on edge and desperate, so in that moment he wanted Hannibal to cast aside everyone else and focus solely on him and his problems. He needed to release, expel the tension from his body the way he always did when he spoke to Hannibal. Not a night had gone by since last Thursday that they hadn’t spoke, because not a single night had gone by without the Voice waking him with a start and urging him to do unspeakable things to his wife.

Will had tried reciting the tracks from the Leonard Cohen album by himself, but he realised that he needed to hear Hannibal’s voice on the other end of the line, or even just the sound of his breathing. Maybe even just the knowledge that Hannibal was there, awake and listening to him, was what managed to calm him down, keep the voice at bay. But he felt guilty. More often than not, he could hear the croak in Hannibal’s voice from having just woken up and wondered if his psychiatrist was totally aware of what he had got himself into when he gave Will his number.

Yet he always picked up. He always stayed on the line. He always waited patiently until Will’s episode had wound down and refused to hang up until he was sure that Will was okay again.

But speaking over the phone alone wasn’t enough for Will. He required the physical presence, too. He couldn’t quite explain why, but he never felt under threat from the Voice when Hannibal was speaking to him. He wondered whether that was down to him or the Voice itself. He wondered whether it was equally as intrigued by the Lithuanian doctor as he was and silenced itself out of curiosity, because if anything, it should despise him.

Finally, at 6 o’clock on the dot, Hannibal’s office door opened and Will got a brief look at another patient of his, rotund and uneasy-looking, but paid him no heed as he barged right in and collapsed onto his usual seat with a groan of exasperation.

“Please, Will, do come in,” Hannibal said, still standing by the door, but his voice was light with amusement rather than displeasure so Will ignored his comment.

“It has to stop, Hannibal,” Will complained, burying his face deep into his hands and his voice emerging muffed through his fingers, “but I don’t think I could defeat it again.” He pulled his face up to see Hannibal taking his seat opposite. He was clearly studying the remnants of the cuts that Will had arrived with last week, now scabs that were rapidly healing into skin again, soon-to-be erased forever without any scarring. Will wondered whether that relieved him or not, having gathered quite the collection of scars over the years to mark various incidents of trauma. What would he be without those ever-present reminders of the depths of depravity that humanity can sink to? He wore the marks of violence like badges of survival across his body, bringing him both shame and pride when he saw them.

He used to worry about his sexual partners seeing him naked, fret about how to explain the scars, but he hadn’t anticipated how totally reluctant to acknowledge them people were. Molly was the only person who ever expressed any degree of emotion upon seeing them for the first time, tracing the taught and ill-fitting skin with her fingers with a look of pity (and perhaps awe) on her face. Then again, the others didn’t want to expose themselves to that kind of open-hearted sentiment and Will understood why. He had also been guilty of ignoring blatant issues when only in search of a quick fuck — the indentations from a recently-removed wedding ring; tracks on the inner elbow; a tattoo with somebody else’s name. They were inconsequential to him, while his past was inconsequential to them. They were mere ghosts in each other’s lives, they didn’t need to acknowledge that the other had purpose and meaning and tangible presents in the outside world.

“Is anything helping?” Hannibal asked and Will drifted from the present briefly to dwell on whether Hannibal had physical tokens of a dark past and how he wore them. He seemed almost too well put together to lay claim to prior traumatisation. Almost.

“You are,” Will answered honestly, then cynically laughed, “but I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect you to watch over me for the rest of my life.”

“I’m here for as long as you need me,” Hannibal assured him and the words were pacifying, like Hannibal had reached out and gently combed his hands through Will’s hair. But it wasn’t enough.

“I don’t want to need you.” He only wanted to live happily with Molly and wake up next to her every morning feeling safe and loved. He didn’t want to go to bed fearing that he may wake up to find her bloody corpse next to him, massacred in some unconscious fit of ferocious derangement. The image haunted him every night for the past week. He supposed things might improve when he picked up his dogs from the kennels at the weekend, then he’d have something to occupy his mind, but currently he didn’t have the skill set to apply for a job and didn’t know Baltimore well enough to indulge in any leisure activities. Currently, his therapy with Hannibal was the only thing that occupied him. Even when he wasn’t talking to him, he was thinking about their conversations, what to discuss at their next session. He was unloading years and years of pent up emotions and distress on the man, but Hannibal appeared to be accepting it all in his stride. “Why do you even want to help me? Why do you bother answering the phone when I’m having a meltdown at 3am because my ‘imaginary friend’ is talking to me?”

“Don’t belittle your own problems, Will. Low self-esteem may very well be at the route of them.”

“But why do you care, Hannibal?” Will sighed agitatedly. “Why not just leave me to be consumed by my demons?”

Hannibal recognised the defeat in Will’s tone and the room was silent for a few second before he spoke again. “I sensed something in you, the second you walked into my office, Will.”

“Yeah, that I was mentally unstable,” Will grumbled acrimoniously, folding his arms over his chest.

“No. I immediately knew that there was more to you than the humble persona that you presented. You should also see that you are fleshier than the flat image you see in the mirror. Like a statue in the dark, a different image is cast depending on where I hold up the candle. Such a majestic creature shouldn’t be shrouded in darkness. My aim is to bathe you in light. I want to see _everything_.” As his lips formed the final sentence, Hannibal leaned forward and his eyes bore through Will, making him feel as if the man could already see him in his entirety. He fidgeted unnervingly under the penetrating stare.

“Maybe I don’t want you to see everything.”

“You’re allowing me inside your head. You’re sharing secrets that you haven’t even shared with your wife. I’m bound to catch glimpses of parts within you that you don’t even know about, see you from angles that you can’t quite reach. You’re giving me that power freely.”

“That’s true. But you can’t see it all. There are shadows that just aren’t meant to be illuminated. The darkness obscures them for a reason. They’re supposed to be hidden."

Hannibal, for the first time, took on a glassy look. His gaze drifted away from Will’s face and a twitch of emotion was barely visible under his mask of professionalism. Will thought back to his carefully concealed secrets that were inevitably buried somewhere inside. He wondered what images may have passed erringly through the caverns of his mind. “Some parts of our minds are too dark to venture into. That’s why I would like to venture there for you." 

“I appreciate your… dedication to my therapy, Dr. Lecter, but I couldn’t allow it. I couldn’t handle it.”

“Are you worried for my safety? Or apprehensive about what I might see?”

Will resisted the urge to let his emotions show on his face as a panic rose inside him. _Did he know?_ He couldn’t… In spite of how it may seem, Hannibal Lecter was in no way capable of reading his mind, so Will cast the thought aside. “A little of both, I suppose,” he answered.

“It’s a shame that you say that, because I’ve been thinking about it and I’ve come up with a way that I might be able to talk with your… ‘friend’.”

Will shook his head. “Not possible. Only I can hear it, remember?”

“Yet you explained that it was capable of using your body as a vessel, so why not use your mouth? It could speak to me through you. I could induce a trance state by using phototherapy and hopefully draw out the Voice while you are still unconscious.”

The idea both excited and frightened Will. On the one hand, there was the possibility that somebody else might be able to share in his experience, but there was also the possibility that the Voice would disclose with Hannibal secrets that no one was ever supposed to find out. The things Will did that only they knew about, things he planned to take to his grave.

“No,” Will stated firmly, after considering the idea for a few seconds. “We’ll work something else out.” He’d decided that he couldn’t risk it. Hannibal would never look at him the same way again.

“Your condition is worsening, Will. We have to figure out how to solve this soon, before somebody gets hurt. And I hate to be the one to say it, but that person is more than likely to be your wife.”

“I keep on picturing her dead,” Will admitted in a whisper, as if it might come true if he said it too loudly.

“Does it ask you to kill her?”

Will nodded solemnly, grinding his teeth at the same time. He wished it was just asking to kill her, he really did. “Not just kill her. It wants me to torture her, rape her… Last night it told me to _eat her_.”

“Eat her?” Hannibal clarified, his eyes widening slightly at the revelation and Will nodded again, embarassed. He probably sounded like some sort of pervert to Hannibal then. “That is… peculiar. And does she have any idea about these thoughts you’re having?”

“She might be getting suspicious. I’m scared to even be in the same room with her sometimes, so I might be ignoring her slightly. But if she’s noticed, she hasn’t said anything… yet.”

“It would probably be best to keep her in the dark for as long as possible.”

“Believe me, that’s what I intend to do.”

“If you need any excuse to leave, then you’re welcome to come see me any time.” Hannibal’s body language was open, welcoming, trying to invite Will to fall even further into his care, his loving embrace. Will wanted to resist the urge to submit, so found himself protesting, though quite dispassionately.

“You have other patients to see.”

“But you’re a priority to me, Will. I told you, there’s more to you than you really know. And I want to know all of it.”

 _Believe me, you don’t_ , Will thought to himself. But as he saw the Doctor tracing his eyes over him, those eyes like iridescent obsidian, glistening the way a raven’s feather flashes in pale moonlight, he came to think that maybe Hannibal really did want to know all of him. His eyes were practically lustful. For a split second, Will considered that Hannibal really might be hungering after him, hence the studious attention, but he readily brushed the thought from his mind. It seemed too self-indulgent as well as disingenuous. Will allowed himself to believe that he could be helped for the sake of Hannibal’s own endeavour to save him, rather than for unconventional motives.

“If you’d like, I have another opening at this same time on a Tuesday. But you would have to visit me at my home,” Hannibal continues insistently.

The request sounded strange. What reason could there possibly be for Hannibal to not be able to carry out therapy in his office on that day? But he didn’t linger on the question. Instead, he accepted. Hannibal wrote down the address, yet again, in his notebook, then tore out the page and handed it to Will. It was just as much the feeling of being anchored down that came when Hannibal had passed the paper with his number on it to him and Will savoured the few seconds of stillness that he felt.

“I do have a couple of other ideas to help you cope, but I’m afraid they are not all so easily employable as the method I have already taught you.”

“Honestly, I’ll take anything.”

Hannibal smiled, pleased with Will’s answer and Will couldn’t help but smile back at him. They seemed to be sharing a secret, bonding over some collective memory, only Will wasn’t quite sure what it was. Elated nonetheless, he felt that jump of electricity between the two of them.

“The first requires a much more intimate setting and more time on our hands, so I’ll perhaps leave that for Tuesday evening. The other is only to inject you with a heavy sedative. It would ensure that you fall into a deep sleep and don’t get woken up by the Voice in the night, but only I could administer it and it would also mean that you wouldn’t be able to drive home. Should you accept, however, I would be happy to drive you.”

It wasn’t the result Will had been hoping for. It was about as appealing as being thrown a bottle of Xanax and twice as worrying. Nevertheless, he was long past the point of questioning Hannibal’s judgement. “That sounds… okay.”

“I apologise that I could not provide a better solution. It does not please me to see you suffering like this, Will. I would like to one day see you reach inner peace and resolve your issues with the thoughts inside your head.”

“They’re not inside my head!” Will exclaimed suddenly, then softer, “I’m sorry, but this Voice? It isn’t a part of me. It’s a monster on my back, but it’s not me.”

“I know, Will. I’m sorry for my poor choice of wording.” Hannibal looked down as he said it and appeared genuinely remorseful. Suddenly Will felt embarrassed about his outburst.

“It can’t be a part of me, Hannibal. I don’t think I could face that.” He muttered the words in a barely audible whisper, staring openly at Hannibal as if his words were a plea. Will thought again about kneeling before the priest; opening his mouth for Hannibal to place the communion bread on his tongue; caressing his chin while he poured the transubstantiated wine-cum-blood into his parted lips.

“I understand. I’m on your side, Will. I’m the only person on your side right now. You need me. Don’t turn against me.”

Will brought his hands up to clutch at his head, stabbing at his temples as if they were self-destruct buttons that could somehow destroy whatever was trying to take over his brain. Or maybe, if he pressed hard enough, he could just crush his own skull and kill himself. Just as he was about to develop a severe headache, he felt Hannibal’s hand land softly on his head. He hadn’t even noticed him coming closer, but he was currently standing right beside Will and comforting him by gently running his hand over the soft, brown curls, saying nothing. The tension left Will’s body and he leant into the touch yearningly, aching for the warmth and comfort of Hannibal’s skilled fingers.

They stayed that way for a few minutes, Hannibal’s minute hand movements seemingly picking out every single knot of stress both physically and mentally until Will was in a near meditative state, practically purring like a cat.

“You can trust me,” Hannibal said eventually.

“I know.”

Hannibal’s hand withdrew and along with it Will lost the feeling of security and tranquillity that it had been gently burning into him.

“Now, how about we administer that sedative?” Hannibal wandered round to his desk and drew out a small briefcase. Will couldn’t see what its contents was, but watched as Hannibal pulled out gloves, a needle and a small vial of something. As Hannibal slipped on the gloves and filled the needle with an observant eye, he looked more like the doctor that Will had first imagined. His eyes appeared to lose their sympathetic sheen, replaced by a cold professionalism. “This is a barbiturate that I often use for patients with severe anxiety, but the sedative-hypnotic drugs should have a similar depressant effect on both you and the Voice in your head. You’ll become very sleepy quite rapidly and I would urge you to go right to bed as soon as you are home. You should sleep all through the night and possibly into the next day depending on how receptive you are to the drug, so I hope you don’t have any important meetings tomorrow.”

“The only important meetings I have are with you,” Will said as Hannibal walked back round to his chair and knelt before him.

“That’s good to hear,” he said in a detached, monotonous tone, but then looked up at Will and smiled fondly in a way that made Will believe his words were far more earnest that the cadence of his voice implied. “Give me your arm.” Hannibal took hold of Will’s outstretched arm and undid the button at the cuff before rolling the sleeve up to his bicep and extending the crook of his elbow towards him. Will watched fairly intently as the needle entered his skin and watched the contents of the it drain into his bloodstream.

“How long will it be before I feel the effects?” Will asked as Hannibal stepped back and stripped the gloves off his hands. He stared at the point where the needle had left a miniscule bead of blood and flexed his fingers experimentally.

“Not long,” Hannibal answered, returning his medical equipment to the small briefcase on his desk. “We should get you home, before you get too drowsy.”

Will stood and waited for Hannibal to hand him his coat as he always did. As he put it on, he began to feel his limbs go fuzzy. Although he had control of his muscles, it felt as if he was sliding somebody else’s arms into the sleeves of the coat. His hands went limp and the alien feeling disturbed him, causing him to get stuck and he flailed around slightly, before Hannibal stepped in. “Allow me,” his voice echoed distantly and Will relaxed his arms, allowing Hannibal to take control, pulling his coat back over his shoulders and easing his hands out of the sleeves, before attentively doing up the buttons.

Buzzing, Will simply stood where he was in Hannibal’s office as the other man retrieved his own coat, along with scarf and gloves, to escort Will back to his car. The world felt fuzzy and his body was slowly turning to jelly as he bided his time.

He smiled mindlessly when Hannibal entered his vision, leaning in so close that Will could vaguely smell his aftershave. In his current state of mind, Hannibal’s face seemed blurry and out place in front of him. Will remembered gazing at his own face in the mirror as it steamed up, gradually making his features indistinct until he was only a nebulous shape in the glass.

He could not see them, but he knew that they were Hannibal’s hands and no more sinister than that, when he felt something grip his face, with finger and thumb holding his chin and another hand pressed against his cheek.

“You’re feeling the effects already?” His voice was surprised but not displeased and Will nodded slowly in reply, continuing to smile drowsily at him. “Let’s get you home, then.”

When he walked, Will was floating, as if he’d been enclosed in his own little bubble and was rolling around in it, his feet drifting above the ground and the outside world curving deferentially around his gliding marble. The physical world yielded easily to him. Hannibal kept one hand lightly on the small of his back, guiding him all the way and Will was grateful for it as he trod across the waiting room atop his personal cloud.

“Give me your car keys, Will,” Hannibal demanded as they stood by the car and Will complied thoughtlessly, immediately reaching into this pocket and handing them over to Hannibal, who then helped Will into the passenger seat.

As they drove back to his apartment, Will began to slowly drift in and out of a cognitive state, but he was at peace. The twisted night-world of Baltimore no longer frightened and agitated him. The Voice’s lingering presence was a distant memory. He and Hannibal were cruising through the city together without a single care in the world.

Will’s eyelids grew heavier and he turned to stare at Hannibal when they stopped at a red light. A nearby streetlamp shone through the car window and ignited the outline of his face in a radiant halo. Will wanted to reach out and touch it then, but his arms felt too heavy, so he settled for staring in timid reverence. At one point, Hannibal caught his gaze and the corner of his mouth twitched only slightly before returning to its emotionless façade.

Back at the apartment block, Hannibal had to support Will almost entirely on the journey to the elevator and from there to Will’s front door. “Will, which pocket are your keys in?” Hannibal asked authoritatively as the stood in front of the large ‘3B’ on the door. He was keeping his voice down, probably mindful of Molly inside.

Will lightly patted the front, right-hand pocket of his trousers. Without hesitation, Hannibal’s hand moved into the pocket, sliding against Will’s thigh in just as soothing a manner as the hand through his hair. Having lingered for a couple of seconds against the thin barrier between skin and skin, Hannibal then pulled out the keys and put them in the door for Will.

“I’m going to leave you now, Will. Sleep, don’t drink any alcohol or take any other form of medication. I will call you tomorrow night, okay?”

Hannibal’s hands were holding up Will’s face, forcing him to look directly into his eyes to properly take in the information he was being given. Will nodded drunkenly, then spontaneously threw this arms around the doctor, burying his head in his shoulder. “Thank you,” he mumbled incoherently into the other man’s scarf as his speech started to slur. Initially, Hannibal’s body went rigid as he was caught unaware, then relaxed and accepted the embrace. Will pulled back, his eyes now drooping and his face becoming lopsided, before clumsily entering the apartment, leaving Hannibal to gently close the door behind him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This was originally going to be a VERY long chapter, but as it neared 7000 words during the editing process, I realised it was probably better off split in two. So hey, now we'll have 13 chapters! And I have some pretty hefty chunks written already, so this could be finished by the end of January, which is good because I've been working out the details for my next story which will be a boarding school au but with the occult!
> 
> Hopefully the Voice's intentions, purpose, nature, etc. will start to become more clear as the story progresses, and similarly for Hannibal. I just hope this is building towards a satisfying conclusion for you guys :)


	8. The Fragrance of Wine

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for a rape mention.

Tuesday night couldn’t have come quicker for Will. Having slept most of Friday, he spent the rest of the weekend on edge as he waited for the Voice to return. Hannibal called as promised, calming his nerves for facing the next night without sedatives.

“But it was so much easier with the drugs,” Will grumbled down the phone, standing outside the doors to the apartment building, bundled up in his coat, hat and scarf. Molly was upstairs, tottering round the kitchen as she prepared dinner and constantly trying to start up a conversation with Will. It was strange for him to think about how easy their life used to be together, how words and minor intimacies easily flowed when they were around each other. He could make strained conversation, but he needed to escape to talk to Hannibal every once in a while. Needing privacy, he’d told her that he was going to buy some eggs at the local store, but had instead hurried out to dial Hannibal’s number and return to his new understanding of normalcy, which was becoming increasingly Hannibal-centric.

“I know, but I can’t have you become too reliant on them. I think you have enough to deal with right now without adding addiction to the list.” Will knew he was right, but groaned in frustration nonetheless.

Aware of how desperately pathetic it sounded, Will still sadly murmured, “I need to see you again, Hannibal. The world doesn’t make sense when you’re not around.”

They held the conversation for as long as Will thought seemed reasonable, before he glanced at the time and rushed off to the corner store to buy the excuse for his absence.

Avoiding Molly had become easier than dealing with the stress of occupying the same room as her when the Voice came out of hiding, so Will often went for long walks in the middle of the day, along the footpath or down to the bay where he watched the boats go by. The dogs were meant to be here with him, keeping him company, but Molly had got into an argument with the landlord and they had to stay in the kennels a little longer. She probably thought that he was angry with her and that’s why she was being given the cold shoulder.

Will now longed to tell her the truth, believing that incurring her doubts about his mental stability might be easier than their current passive breakdown, but Hannibal insisted that he refrain. It meant that Hannibal was the only person he could turn to, though. In the evenings, he called Hannibal and they talked and talked. He ended up only speaking to Molly at night, just before he crawled into bed.

On Monday evening, when Will’s thoughts were only with Hannibal and what he would wear to Hannibal’s house and what they would talk about and what his new form of therapy would entail, he felt one of Molly’s hands graze lightly across his back.

“This bed hasn’t gotten a workout in a while now...” she whispered flirtatiously into his ear, but he only froze in fear rather than react with arousal as he may have done before. He wanted to make love to her — he really did, but he could already foresee the horrors that may arise if the Voice were to catch them in the throes of passion. He struggled to even think about her sexually when it was constantly waking him up with hisses of rape. It made him want to castrate himself. Will shuddered involuntarily and realised his mistake when he felt the hand sharply withdraw.

“Sorry, I’m just not in the mood,” he mumbled, shifting away from her and then reciting, “Suzanne, Master Song, Winter Lady,” calmly under his breath, hoping to keep the Voice at bay for perhaps just one night.

No such luck.

Will’s dreams had moulded to involve Hannibal at every twist and turn. As he swam, Hannibal was swimming beside him. As he walked around his party, greeting guests, Hannibal was at his right hand side the entire time, being introduced to every new face. When the Voice emerged, low and rumbling, awaking Will from his dreams, he felt Hannibal’s hand slip into his. His first thought when he woke up with the sinister Voice susurrating sick fantasies into his ear was _I have to call Hannibal now_ , sparing little time for concern over Molly’s fate. He didn’t look to check that she was still sleeping soundly the way he once had. 

Hannibal picked up the line almost immediately. “I’m here, Will,” he assured him and Will fell into his coping technique easily: repeating song titles to the rhythm of Hannibal’s controlled breathing.

~

Hannibal’s door opened and Will was met with a pleasantly surprised smile — not at his presence, he was right on time — but Will had made the effort to dress up. He wore an iron-pressed shirt today, with a neat dinner jacket on top. His hair had been groomed and he had even added a splash of cologne. Hannibal seemed to notice it as Will entered, his nose scrunching up slightly, causing Will’s stomach to sink. When preparing for that evening, he felt more like he was getting ready for a romantic date than a therapy session and probably looked like he did, too. Molly eyed him as he spit-shone his shoes, like a wife who was worried their partner was having an affair, although she was well aware that he was visiting Hannibal and knew that he wouldn’t ever betray her like that. But Will couldn’t explain his rising desire to impress Hannibal, unlike their first therapy session when he had shown up in one of his scruffiest outfits without an ounce of anxiety. Now, he stressed over which shirt Hannibal would like more. He felt like he needed to adjust his effort because the session was held within Hannibal’s own private sphere and Will wanted to believe that was partially due to the underlying friendship between then. Will wanted to prove that he was worthy of that friendship.

As he entered, the romantic tone of the evening was scarcely quelled when he saw that Hannibal had prepared dinner for them both.

“I thought you could do with some relaxation before we begin our session,” Hannibal explained as he led him through to an exquisite dining room that looked as if it has been carved out inside the heart of an oak tree. The walls and décor could have been intricately whittled wood, shining like brass under the amber lighting. “You may have heard that I am fairly renowned for my skills as a chef. Perhaps the desire to handle meat lingers from my days as a surgeon,” Hannibal joked with an enigmatic smile, while he pulled out a chair for Will to sit on.

The facetious remark conjured up strikingly visceral images in Will’s head. First, he saw Hannibal’s gloved hands plunging into the opened-up abdomen of a patient, swilling around in the blood and guts, pulling out organs. Then a precipitous and unanticipated image flashed through his head of Hannibal’s bloodied hands sinking into his own skull, where the top of his cranium had been sliced off cleanly to reveal his brain oozing and pulsating underneath. Will felt the fingers tickling inside his head and tried to shake it off.

“It smells amazing,” Will replied, taking his seat and studying the napkin on his plate that had been fashioned into a swan.

Hannibal caught his fascination with the origami napkin and said, “I like for my diners to have the optimum experience when they feast. Showmanship is of the utmost importance in providing that.”

Will sniffed the air and hummed contentedly at whatever he could smell wafting through from the kitchen. “Taste is fairly important, too.”

“Have no doubt, I always procure the highest quality meat on the market. I am very fastidious with my butcher.”

Will looked at the table before him with the gleaming cutlery and outrageous centrepiece, then up at Hannibal in his sorrel-coloured plaid suit and mustard yellow tie with matching pocket square. Never when he was a child had he pictured being at a dinner such as this. He was hit by the familiar feeling that he didn’t belong for a short second, until he saw Hannibal gazing back at him and realised for perhaps the first time in his life that he did. His heart swelled.

Hannibal announced that he was bringing the first course and returned minutes later with a platter of kobe beef, explaining to Will as he served it how the Japanese cows were raised and fed, about the high fat content of the dish which made it far richer than normal beef. Will listened intently to every word as he chewed and marvelled at the marbled look of the meat, following the pride in Hannibal’s voice as he talked about his food.

As the meal continued, Will was relieved at the lack of a mention of psychiatry. Hannibal was putting aside the time specifically for them and their personal connection to bloom, giving him the attention that no other patient of his was afforded, Will was sure. Though he did not complain, he was surprised by the willingness with which Hannibal had allowed their professional and personal relationship to blur. Will himself had been eager for friendship and therefore welcomed it, but now when he thought about their dynamic, he became confused between what related to psychiatry and what stemmed from a real, deeper bond between the two of them. He wondered if Hannibal would allow this confusion so easily with others, or whether Will was special for some reason. Hannibal had told him he was, but he hadn’t believed him. Now he did.

Throughout the evening, Hannibal consistently served iced water instead of wine and it was a frank reminder of what was to follow the meal. Hannibal didn’t want Will to get drunk in case it might disturb his therapy, or just in case he might need to be sedated again. When it finally came time for dessert to be cleared away, Will appeared to curl up into himself, dreading having to remind them both why he was there in the first place. But Hannibal walked behind him and placed a strong hand on his shoulder, causing Will to unfurl slightly and turn his head to look at Hannibal who smiled down at him.

“I have hope for this new technique, Will. Please, follow me.”

Will was obedient, the Doctor’s words sounding out like gospel to him and he was but a dedicated member of the flock, following everything he said without question. He trailed his shepherd out of the dining room and into a small, dark chamber with two armchairs and a sofa surrounding a polished, quilted maple coffee table. The curtains were drawn and very heavy, blocking out any light that may have tried to seep in from the streets. Only one light in the room was left on, making the dimly-lit space into a quiet womb for Will to feel safe and secluded.

He immediately headed for one of the armchairs, but Hannibal sat down on the sofa and directed for him to follow by patting the space next to him lightly. Will did as he was told and sat with their bodies turned into each other, looking at Hannibal expectantly and nearly excitedly.

“I want to try a form of therapy that is based on hypnosis, using touch to induce a hypnotic state,” Hannibal explained while Will strained slightly to meet the psychiatrist’s eyes in the darkness. He only caught the jut of a cheekbone and the curve of his lips, but his eyes withdrew into the eclipsed contours of his face.

“What’s wrong with the sedatives?” Will questioned dejectedly.

“It isn’t advisable to overuse them. This would be a much easier way to create similar effects. I brought you to my house to do this instead of my office because I need you to associate this hypnosis strongly with me and _only me_. Breathe in, Will. What do you smell?”

He smelled the remnants of their dinner, burning candle wax, clementines and aromatic red wine.

“I smell _you_.”

“Very good. We’re currently in my home, so you should feel like I am all around you. In a few seconds, I will turn off the light and you will feel my hands. Allow yourself to relax.”

Will did as he was told and the singular lamp beside Hannibal was switched off, thrusting him into complete darkness. He waited then to sense the touch, his body all cold and sequestered before he felt Hannibal’s hand on his, first clasping his fingers, then tracing up his arm. It was almost too intimate, but he had come to associate Hannibal’s contact with total calmness, so from under the discomfort burgeoned a stronger feeling of total tranquillity and Will relaxed into the touch, unflinching when he felt another hand at the side of his face. He trusted Hannibal, knew that the purpose of this was to help cure him. The fingers caressed his cheek, then moved up to his forehead, while the other hand moved to clasp his yet again. The tenebrosity of the room seemed to subside slightly and Will began to make out facial features yet again. He saw Hannibal’s eyes staring at him very intently and wondered to himself what exactly he was seeing.

“I would like you to look at me for just a moment. As you focus your eyes on me, and listen to my voice, I would like you to allow things to take place,” Hannibal spoke, his voice as gentle as a feather and flowing rhythmically from between his lips, which Will focused on powerfully. Hannibal then let the hand against Will’s face slide around to the back of his neck and it felt so good, he almost moaned at the touch but managed to restrain himself. His fingers started stroking Will’s wrist gently, then they were grasping his wrist and holding it with increasing firmness as the grip on Will’s neck also became tighter. “As I touch you, I wonder if you have noticed yet that there is a drowsy, heavy feeling beginning to occur in and around your eyes. As I increase the pressure, that heavy feeling in those eyes will keep becoming stronger. As the eyes begin to close down, it becomes increasingly more desirable to allow them to remain closed. They are closing down all the way now. Let it happen. Want it to happen. Feel it happening now.”

Will felt as if he’d been dropped into zero-gravity. He was floating and nothing could hurt him. He was standing in the eye of the storm but completely immune to its forces and he laughed victoriously into the wind.

“Will?”

He couldn’t answer. His entire body was beautifully numb and he had no control over his lips.

“When I draw away my touch, you will feel yourself returning to your body, fully awake.”

Will tried to frown, wanted to object, but he was far too content at that moment, like a baby inside this womb, with Hannibal as his umbilical cord. Then the cord was cut. Hannibal’s hands gently slipped off of his skin and Will returned to his old body as if it was a deflated balloon being pumped full of his life force.

“How did that feel?”

Will’s mouth opened but no words came out as he returned to the foreign feel of his corporal being and struggled to articulate his fugacious experience, the evanescent serenity. “Wonderful,” he sighed eventually, although the word did not seem to fully comprehend all that he had felt and he elaborated with, “Perfect.”

“We should be able to use this technique if the Voice ever occurs while I am present. But it will only work with me,” Hannibal explained as Will continued to come down.

“It’s always calm around you,” Will reflected, “and I don’t know why. Maybe it’s because I feel more at ease around you. Whenever Molly’s there, I’m nervous about what might happen if I lose control to it again, like I did before. It might be a stupid thing to worry about since I haven’t even come close to hurting her yet, but it’s difficult looking at the woman I love and hearing all the vile things about her screamed at me and not really being able to do anything about it."

“You said it doesn’t like you having other people around, which I assume is where its natural hatred for your wife comes from. But wouldn’t you consider me a friend?”

That stopped Will in his tracks and he paused to contemplate the Doctor’s question.

“I would consider you my best friend,” Will readily admitted, “but it always seems to settle when you’re around. I don’t know why. I couldn’t tell you why.”

“Perhaps it might be time to reflect on what the Voice inside you is saying about your inner psyche.” Hannibal’s voice was slow and heedful, aware that he was entering choppy waters.

“No,” Will snapped. “No, the two things aren’t linked. The Voice doesn’t express my inner feelings. It is separate from me.”

“I understand.”

“Do you? Because you keep saying stuff like that!”

“Will, I’m a doctor of the mind. Assessing mental illness is what I am trained to do and I’m afraid to say it’s what I naturally look for. While I couldn’t diagnose you with a condition based on the symptoms you describe and the behaviour you present, I cannot rule out the role that your own childhood trauma and mental instability may play in fabricating an inner demon for you to blame.”

Will shut down immediately. He wouldn’t hear of it. “So I’m crazy and psychopathic and —”

“Will,” Hannibal said calmly, reaching out and grabbing his hand. “I promised I would help you. That help may require you to let go of your own inhibitions about the nature of this Voice.” Will struggled to draw upon his previous anger with the grounding weight of Hannibal’s hand on his, still reeling from the hypnosis. “You can trust me. I will save you.” At those words, Will’s mind unclenched from its wrath and drifted, meeting Hannibal’s in some sort of metaphysical world between their two bodies.

The touch alone made Will fall back into his state of hypnosis and his anger was immediately quelled. He couldn’t even remember why he was angry in the first place, he only knew that he wanted Hannibal’s hands to be constantly touching him, drawing out the anxiety and apprehension and replacing it with peacefulness. It was not unlike the effects of the barbiturate, but without the drowsiness. Rather, Will felt more alive and even more personally bonded with Hannibal Lecter, like the man had thrust a needle into his chest and sewn a thread right into his heart that connected the two of them immortally.

But eventually, the hands had to draw away again and Will was fraught for Hannibal’s touch to the point where he nearly cried out in desperation for it. A slight sound may have even slipped out because Hannibal seemed to look at him afterwards in a way that went beyond affection. Had Will stopped to study the older man’s eyes for any longer, he may have spotted a flicker of desire igniting behind the eyes — a desire that outweighed mere fascination or intrigue, more than fondness and friendship, into a vehement lust. Will may have seen the moment when Hannibal decided that he wanted more than to just cultivate Will’s neurotic sense of dependency so that he may dig around in his fascinating mind; he may have caught the moment when Hannibal Lecter determined to have Will all to himself.

But of course, Will didn’t catch any of it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I actually copied the words Hannibal uses for inducing hypnosis from a guide of how to put someone in a hypnotic state using the handshake method. Usually, they will just hold your hand and shake it up and down slowly, but of course Hannibal made it a little more intimate. Methinks he might be using this to his advantage...
> 
> Oh and in case you were wondering, that "beef" was only from a fat cow in the derogatory sense ;)


	9. Baltimore's Ghosts

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for non-con elements as well as self-harm elements in this chapter.

Hannibal prescribed him with sleeping pills: a rattling orange bottle with an official prescription label, Will’s badge of dishonour. He took them every night before bed; a nightly reminder of his instability. They worked initially, ensuring that he slowly drifted off even though his head was still filled with fears and doubts, horrific imagery. But they couldn’t stop the nightmares. Will’s head was bursting with blood and violence and it became uncontrollable when he slept. Molly noticed but her attempts to talk to him about it were hindered by Will only making brief replies and then excusing himself to complete some menial task.

“It’s getting worse,” Will wept down the phone to Hannibal as he sat in the empty bathtub and clawed at his skin. He could feel it crawling all over him, like tiny mites wriggling through his body hair and chewing at the dead layer of his epidermis. He was now covered in tiny scratches all over, like the ones that had faded from his face a few weeks ago. Molly spotted them, saw him as he raked his fingernails over his body right next to her, but she refrained from speaking up.

Their relationship felt strained and distant all of a sudden. Will couldn’t bear to be around her because he couldn’t look at her without seeing what the Voice in his head wanted him to see. Molly was recognising his distance and trying to respect his state of mind by not pushing him, but it was a fragile shape of living that was bound to shatter at any moment. Will feared what exactly might happen when it did.

“Are you taking the pills?” Hannibal asked.

_“Are you taking your crazy pills?”_

Will’s nails dug a crescent-shaped incision into his shoulder. He pulled at the skin, peeling it away to open up the flesh underneath and gasped slightly at the pain. “Stop that,” Hannibal reprimanded him and Will’s hand clenched and fell back into his lap. “Are you taking the pills?”

“Yes… But… The nightmares only really started after I began taking them, actually.” Will’s voice was uncertain. He felt like he was accusing Hannibal of something. Nevertheless, it was true that he may have been awoken by the Voice in the night before, but always from pleasant dreams to mild nightmares, never the Hellish landscape that grew in his mind when his head hit the pillow now.

“Nightmares have never been a reported symptom of the drug,” Hannibal said in reply, making Will feel even guiltier for suggestively blaming Hannibal’s care. How could he when Hannibal was the only person who kept him clinging on?

“Of course,” he rushed to get out, quick to defend himself when he wasn’t really being accused, “I only thought you’d want to know.”

“And I do. Thank you, Will.”

Will’s fingers mindlessly returned to the open wound on his shoulder and his nails started digging around inside, as if he was trying to claw his own skin off. He’d all but flayed the site by the time he’d calmed down enough to return to bed, a piece of sterile gauze taped awkwardly to his shoulder as per Hannibal’s instructions.

~

Will had been under Hannibal’s care for a couple of months when Molly finally gathered up the courage to speak to him. It was a Friday evening and Will was reeling from having the Voice intermittently whispering threats to him throughout the day.

_“If you don’t kill her, I will.”_

It was an empty threat at that point and Will knew it, but he was past the point of thinking logically anymore. Will had finally resolved that he was broken. He sat hunched over on his side of the bed, rubbing his temples and trying to remember Hannibal’s advice about what to do, but all he wanted was to feel his touch. After that first session at Hannibal’s house, he always craved the sensual feel of Hannibal’s hands on his skin, like a healing Shaman who extracted the wickedness inside him with his magical palms.

He heard Molly enter but ignored her entirely as she seemed to be getting used to now. Although Will despised himself for doing so and wanted nothing more than to confess everything to her, Hannibal was wary about opening himself up too much for Molly. He’d warned him that her concern could have him locked up in a psychiatric ward and tied to bed with tubes in his arms if he wasn’t too careful, so Will did what was necessary and reminded himself that it was only temporary. When Hannibal finally cured him, he would take her strongly in his arms and never let her go ever again.

“Will,” Molly sighed, pacing round to his side of the bed and sitting down next to him, “I know that I was the one who asked you to go see a psychiatrist in the first place, but I don’t think you should see Hannibal Lecter anymore.” At that she placed her hand on top of his and Will flinched away from the touch. He moved his hands to his lap, out of her reach. Unlike the sweet peace that he felt when Hannibal touched him, with Molly he only felt agitation and pain and fear. She sensed his discomfort and became upset when he didn’t reply. Will only dreaded that the words that came out of his lips would be the curses that the Voice currently filled his head with. So he said nothing at all. “You’ve only gotten worse since you started seeing him!”

“What does she know?” the Voice hissed, seemingly just as angry at the statement as Will was, but Will kept his head down and his hands balled up and spoke calmly.

“He’s helping me,” Will grumbled through gritted teeth. He saw Molly reach out to touch his knee, but she hesitated before she made contact.

“No, Will. He’s not.” Her voice was blunt and serious.

Rage flared up inside him suddenly. His tranquillity snapped instantly. “How do you know, Molly? You haven’t even met him! For the record, he _is_ helping me, I _am_ going to keep seeing him and right now he’s the only thing keeping me in this god damn city!” His heart rate was rapid and his breathing heavy as he finished speaking and finally whirled round to look at her. She appeared to jump back, fright pooling in her eyes and Will realised that he must have been a sight with his dishevelled hair and eyes bulging in fury.

“What’s her problem? She’s just a jealous whore now that she doesn’t have all your attention,” the Voice sneered, forcing Will to tear his gaze away from his wife yet again as he burned with shame at the thoughts in his head.

“What about me?” she asked softly, barely louder than a whisper and Will struggled to reply. He wanted to be back at Hannibal’s house, sipping wine and eating expensive beef as if nothing was wrong with him. He thought about the napkin shaped into a swan and how that small touch of elegance existed so casually within Hannibal’s world.

“I came here _for you_ ,” Will said eventually, his voice croaky and broken. He immediately realised that wasn’t the answer that she wanted.

Frustrated, Molly stood up and began pacing back and forth in front of Will. “I told you that we shouldn’t go here if it was going to ruin our relationship and you told me that it wouldn’t. But look at us, Will!” She threw out her hands in frustration, gesturing between the two of them as if their relationship at that point could be perfectly condensed to a snapshot at that moment. They fought from across a few feet of distance, a rift between their separate bodies — they lived antagonistically parallel to each other, not harmoniously together as they had intended. “We’re dying,” she admitted.

The words pierced right through him, a sword plunged into his chest.

“So you think our relationship is ruined?” Will snapped back at her, leaping to his feet, but having to fight the forces that tried to get him to lunge at her, shove her back, grip her by the arms and shake her as he roared in her face. Instead, he marched over to where his shoes were and hurriedly started putting them on.

“Come on, you can’t just walk out! We need to talk about this,” Molly begged him as she realised what he was doing. When his shoes were tied, he only paused to snatch the bottle of pills from beside his bed before hurrying towards the front door, not quite sure whether he was departing out of anger or concern. Either way, he couldn’t bear to be around Molly right then. Her presence was like sandpaper scratching at his brain.

“Believe me,” Will hissed, “it would be better for us both if I just leave right now.”

“Are you going to see Hannibal?” she asked, following him as he stormed out into the hall towards the stairs.

“None of your business,” he called back.

“Will! Will, come back here!”

He ignored her as the door to the stairway swung shut behind him.

He knew where he was going straightaway. He knew the way there off by heart and his legs seem to speed up at the prospect of returning to the dark womb where Hannibal took care of the hypnosis, placing him under his spell and relieving all of his pent up emotions. He tried not to be reminded of the last time, however many years ago now, that he’d run from home after a dispute, tiring from the constant crying after a while and deciding to take a quick nap among the reeds. He wouldn’t be stopping short of his goal this time though, where salvation awaited him.

“How dare she?” it spat. “She hasn’t even met him but she thinks she can decide whether or not he’s good for you?”

“And why do you care?” Will realised his mistake instantaneously. Weeks had gone by, being taunted intermittently but persistently, yet he hadn’t given in to the Voice. He hadn’t legitimised it with a reply. But now he’d just let it slip out, still reeling from the heat of his domestic dispute, like the old times when they would converse with each other for hours on end, going back and forth like real pals.

“Oh, so now we’re talking, are we?”

“No, we’re not,” Will growled, looking anxiously around to see if anybody walking along the street was ogling at him, but of course they didn’t seem to care. His feet moved faster and he could hear the swishing of the fabric at his arms and legs as if his body was trying to start a fire with his own limbs.

“Yes, we are.” Will’s lips were pursed shut. He tried to imagine getting a stapler and puncturing the metal pins through the flesh, pinning his lips together. “What changed, Will? Why don’t you want to be friends anymore?”

It didn’t speak in such a way to ignite his sympathy, but rather to agitate him, draw out an answer. And of course it knew the right buttons to press in order to get one.

“You tried to make me kill Bethany!” Will exclaimed incredulously.

“She was going to take away your dogs, get you into trouble. I was making sure you asserted yourself. I was protecting you.”

“Didn’t feel much like it when you tried to drown me too,” Wil now mumbled, remembering the panic and terror as he struggled against the wall of water and felt his lungs grow heavy.

“I would have never let you drown, Will. You know that deep down.”

Did he? He wasn’t sure.

“What the hell do you even want from me? Why now? Why, when I was finally happy, did you decide to start ‘protecting’ me again?” Will became animated in his outrage, even doing finger quotes as he walked along, for no one in particular to see.

“Happy? _That’s_ what you call happy?” The Voice was derisive and unsympathetic.

“Yes!” Will shouted and finally garnered a few looks from a couple of young women who swiftly crossed the road as he approached.

“You were happy in Wolf Trap. You were happy with your dogs and your boats, living your dream. Then _she_ came along and took you to this horrible city where they all stare at you and you don’t have any friends or a job. You’re trying to blame your misery on me, but really it’s her who’s making you miserable.”

Will snorted. “There’s more to happiness than just doing what I want. Molly being happy makes me happy.”

“Does it?” It left the question to hang in the air, but expected no answer. “Either way, she doesn’t evem seem happy now.”

“That’s because of you!”

“No. It’s because of you.”

Will’s words faltered, struggling to not acknowledge that it was of course correct in its analysis. “I don’t want to hurt her, though!” he finally blurted out.

“Don’t you? Don’t you want to hurt people?”

“No! The things you talk about, they make me feel physically sick.” Will’s teeth grinded together and he felt as if he was being beaten into submission. In all honesty, he’d probably lost any ensuing argument the second he replied, so he only sighed, “Why can’t you just leave me alone?”

“I’m protecting you.”

“How?”

“From yourself.” The Voice spoke with total sincerity, as if these answers were as blatant as answering the colour of the sky or simple mathematics.

“No, you’re _breaking_ me.”

“You just don’t know what’s best for you, Will. You won’t be happy until you comprehend that.”

Will kept his mouth shut, didn’t know what was a natural follow up to that statement. Rather, he just let the words sink slowly into his head as he continued to Hannibal’s house. The Voice seemed to realise that its words were sticking with him and remained suspiciously quiet. If anything, shouldn’t it want him to avoid Hannibal? Shouldn’t it detest Hannibal even more than Molly? But Will didn’t dwell long on this particular question because he kept thinking about why he wouldn’t know what was best for him. Why did that statement seem to ring so clear to him?

Baltimore’s nightmarish realm that sprung up from the sidewalks under the glare of artificial light suddenly felt less of a foreign world to Will as he walked briskly through it. On the other side of the windscreens, he felt just like one of them. The kids with nothing better to do than throw rocks into abandoned buildings, creating scoring systems for each pane of glass, congratulating themselves afterwards with beer stolen from their parents; the bitter smokers drifting down to the streets to isolate themselves from the unbearable constriction of domestic life that awaited them inside, puffing longingly at their cigarettes as they willed them to burn just a little longer; the vagabonds and strays who drifted aimlessly through the thick smoke of the city, embracing the biting cold and slumping over by the roadside to contemplate mistakes that were made years ago. All of the ghosts that haunted Baltimore’s streets. Will was one of them now. The man frantically arguing with himself as he rushed along the well-known route to see the one man who made it all suddenly tolerable.

Hannibal’s house was sturdy as a mountain, like always. Will ascended the great steps as if he was ascending the last few feet to the peak of Everest, hammering against the door like he was planting his flag in the rock.

Hannibal opened the door with a face that betrayed very little and allowed Will to push past him, inviting himself into a home he now felt he shared in equal part. It was closer to a home than 3B at least.

“I’m right in thinking that we don’t have a session tonight, aren’t I?” Hannibal pointed out, closing the door before returning his attention to Will, who was still riled up and agitatedly pacing Hannibal’s hallway. A light layer of sweat made his face gleam and his lips were trembling with the cold.

“You need to help me, Hannibal,” Will groaned, his fingers flexing and unflexing as he tried to relieve his tension, but to no avail. “I don’t know if I can handle this much longer.”

“Why don’t we go through to the kitchen and I’ll fix you up some coffee. I just got the beans today, shipped all the way from Sumatra. It has a very sweet and syrupy taste. I think you’ll like it.” Hannibal placed a hand on his back and started leading him to the kitchen but Will stopped in his tracks.

“No, I don’t want coffee! I want— I want…” Will looked down at Hannibal’s hand, then grabbed it and pressed it to his face. “Please, just make it all go away again.”

Hannibal gently extracted his hand and put it on Will’s shoulder, more as a way of keeping him at arm’s length than comforting him this time though. He observed Will for a few seconds, making some sort of judgement while Will shifted uncomfortably under the other man’s gaze, but held it nonetheless. “Will, be honest with me, is it getting worse?”

“Yes.”

“Is it becoming more frequent?”

“Yes.” Will’s voice cracked slightly.

“Is it still encouraging you to hurt your wife?”

“Yes.” The sound that came out of his mouth was more of a sob than an intelligible word.

Hannibal turned away suddenly. “I’m not helping you, am I?” His voice sounded hurt, disappointed in himself. Will immediately grabbed him by the arm and forced him back round to face him. He took the sides of Hannibal’s face in his palms, just as Hannibal often did with him, and held him there to lock eyes with quiet intensity.

“No, it’s me getting worse! You’re the only person who provides any release from it!” Will assured him.

Hannibal seemed to look down on him from a few feet above, although he was barely a few inches taller. Nonetheless, Will felt small and vulnerable when Hannibal looked at him then, but that vulnerability was welcomed. He allowed himself to be susceptible around Hannibal.

“I think I’m going to need to speak to the Voice, Will. I need to understand it fully, know what I’m dealing with.”

Will stepped back nervously and his hands dropped from Hannibal’s face while his head slowly shook. “I don’t… I can’t…” he stammered, terrified of his own mind, concerned for Hannibal’s safety. He had something infectious, he was sure of it. He didn’t want to allow it to spread to a good man like Hannibal.

“It’s the only way, Will,” Hannibal said with certainty but Will continued to back away, until Hannibal strode back up to him and seized his hand. “I want to help you.” He reached up with his other hand, placing it round the back of Will’s neck. “You have to let me help you.” Will seemed to fall into a trance then. His eyelids fluttered and he sensed that he was beginning to wander involuntarily into a dissociative state. Hannibal kept his hands firmly in place, tightening their grasp. “I know what’s best for you, Will. You have to let me perform phototherapy.” Will was drifting. “Will, you need to consent to it. Do you consent?”

Will eased closer to Hannibal’s body, drawn to its raw warmth and nodded. He felt as if he was speaking through somebody else’s lips when he said, “Okay.”

“Excellent.”

Hannibal’s hands slipped away and Will felt as if he had been suddenly thrust out into the cold. Without another word, Hannibal started walking away, back towards their dark little room and Will eagerly ran after him, like a duckling scampering after its mother.

Once inside, Hannibal quickly drew the curtains and turned off all the lights before instructing Will to sit on one of the armchairs. He brought out a metronome and placed it on the table, followed by an odd-looking device with multiple lightbulbs attached, setting it down directly in front of Will.

“This is another form of hypnosis,” Hannibal explained. “Yet again, it will put you in a trance state, but far deeper than the touch therapy. You should remain conscious at the time, but may forget what occurred afterwards.”

Will started to get nervous and he wiped his sweaty palms against his thighs while Hannibal set off the metronome, sending it swerving to and fro, then began talking to him in his calming voice.

“Close your eyes, Will. Keep them closed. Good. You are now in total darkness. You are falling into the black, letting it pull you away from your mind. You will be safe.” Will suddenly saw the startling flashing lights appear on the back of his eyelids, but he did not react as they flashed in time to the soothing ticking of the metronome. “Look at the lights. Follow them. When I turn them off, you will feel as if you are in a deep sleep, yet you will still be able to talk to me.”

Will watched the lights and their white splotches flickering through the blackness. Then suddenly they were gone. Will felt as if some cord linking him to the real world had been cut and now he was thrown recklessly out into nothingness. His eyes remained closed and he was drenched in black. He could still hear the metronome. He could still feel the armchair around his body, but he didn’t feel as if his body was currently his own to use.

Hannibal said something, but it was as if he was speaking through a mouthful of cotton wool and Will couldn’t decipher a word of it.

Then Will’s lips began to move, although he hadn’t consciously wanted them to. He still heard nothing.

It may have been an otherwise disturbing experience, but he also felt oddly detached from his emotions. It was almost as if he was sleeping without dreaming, only hearing the sounds of people as they moved around him, like he was in a coma.

Hannibal talked with him for a while, though the words were indecipherable and Will could only make out the tick-tocking of the metronome as it continued to keep time.

Finally, the talking stopped.

Will felt Hannibal’s body in close proximity, leaning over him, breathing all over his face. Will did not flinch, he did not move. The breathing came closer until Will could feel the short puffs of breath against his lips. A thumb landed on his chin, ever-so-delicately pulling his bottom lip down, opening his mouth just slightly. Then, Hannibal kissed him. It was innocent though needy. He inhaled deeply as their lips pressed tightly together, as if he was breathing through Will. He was like an alcoholic, taking a sly sip of wine when nobody was looking, savouring that one tiny tipple, before setting the glass down defiantly. Hannibal pulled back. Will, half-conscious, felt the heavy breath on his lips again while Hannibal’s face hovered a mere couple of inches above his own. Then he felt the breath against his ear as Hannibal whispered something he couldn’t make out.

Then he was gone.

When Will woke up the next day in an unfamiliar bed, he remembered nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, it is NOT implied that anything happened after that kiss. Hannibal put him right to bed. He does care about Will. Really. He sincerely believes that he has his best interests at heart, he just uses unconventional methods to achieve them.
> 
> Also, phototherapy as a practice is nothing like this. I didn't even incorporate any elements of real hypnosis/therapy like I did with the touch therapy, this is just entirely fictitious.
> 
> I might add another chapter again. Thinking about it, there's a lot more to come that may not fit into my chapter outlines without seeming like it's too rushed.
> 
> I've been doing a fair bit of research for my fic about dark magic as I realised I knew next to nothing about the subject matter. Initially, I thought I could just make up my own rulebook entirely, but realised I wanted to base it on something and I ended up having a lot of fun with it. I decided to make the focus of the dark magic mainly Hermeticism, using the Lesser Key of Solomon and Le Grand Grimoire as my main guides. That and googling a lot about how to summon demons. It feels very Buffy-esque.
> 
> Finally, I want to say that I know Will expresses a lot of negative thoughts towards the idea of being deemed mentally ill or "crazy". But these are just his characters opinions and in no way reflect how I feel about anyone who may suffer from mental illnesses, so I hope I haven't offended anyone.


	10. The Lover and The Violin

Will didn’t have to question where he was. He could smell Hannibal’s presence on the air as strongly as if he was burying his face right into his neck. Yet the room he awoke in was far too plainly furnished to be satisfactory to Hannibal’s own tastes — it must have been a guest room. This didn’t come as a shock to Will. Where else would he be? In Hannibal’s own bed? Although the details of the previous night were unclear, he knew he would have gone to Hannibal before he would have gone in search of a warm body of a stranger to embrace his. He was certain that Hannibal’s voice alone was more therapeutic than meaningless sex.

Strangely, however, he didn’t feel hungover as he might have expected, so then began to fret over the memory loss. Was he worsening? Was he developing dementia and his brain was slowly eating away at itself? But before he had time to panic, the door opened and there was Hannibal, cradling a steaming mug of coffee. Will had the faintest feeling that he knew it originated from Sumatra, although he did not consider himself much the coffee bean connoisseur. Nevertheless, the scent wafting out of the mug was enticing at that moment.

Hannibal sat gingerly at the end of his bed, handing him the mug wordlessly and Will accepted it. He took a sip and marvelled at the exotic taste for a moment, then waited for Hannibal to speak. When he didn’t, he admitted, “I don’t remember what happened last night.”

He was preparing to hand his head in shame, to be regaled with tales of his disgraceful behaviour and rash decisions. But instead, Hannibal only hummed, “Ah, don’t worry. I thought that might happen.”

Will frowned at him, took another sip. God, it was good coffee. “Why?”

“After the phototherapy.” Will stared at his psychiatrist, totally dumbstruck and confused. He longed to recall something of the night before, but combing through his recent memories was a process much alike trying to locate a specific sea shell on the shore as the tide came in, the methodical procedure constantly being interrupted by a deluge of foamy brine washing over the beach. Just when he felt words resurfacing, they seemed to be shoved back down into his head, swaddling them under the black of his dreams. Hannibal’s head turned slightly and he frowned. “Don’t you remember agreeing to it?”

“No…” Will replied, embarrassed for some inexplicable reason. “I remember arguing with Molly and then leaving the flat, but after that it’s a little unclear.”

Will still found the emotions fairly intact: the rage, then the fear, then the anxiety, then calmness. Yet the actual events of the previous night continued to elude him, constantly getting dragged back in by the ebbing tide.

“You wanted me to speak to the Voice. You told me to go ahead with the hypnosis,” Hannibal informed him. Will was mildly shocked. He’d been so dead set against it. Something fairly huge must have swayed him…

“And?” he rasped, almost afraid to get an answer.

“I’m afraid it didn’t work as I had intended. The trance it put you in was far too deep and you were immediately unconscious. I worried what the effects might be of rousing you too suddenly, so I put you in bed and called your wife to tell her that you’d had a bit much to drink and then come to see me.” Hannibal pulled Will’s phone out of his pocket and placed it on the bedside table. He’d sorted it all out, resolved the situation in a single night, then brought him coffee. Will gazed blankly at him, trying to figure out what super power he was hiding and why Will was so contrary to him. Then he buried his face in his hands.

“Oh god, Molly… How am I going to look at her?” he groaned loudly and felt Hannibal’s hand rest on top of his calf and give it a gentle rub through the sheets, but the typical smoothing feeling felt muffled, like gentle words whispered with a sore throat. It needed to be skin. Will was averse to requesting the more intimate contact, however, as he felt too exposed wearing only a t-shirt and briefs.

“As you normally do,” Hannibal assured him, squeezing his leg lightly through the fabric and standing up. “She was very understanding, if also upset. I will take you home and you can see how she’s feeling yourself. She was very grateful though.” Then Hannibal’s eyes narrowed slightly. “She apologised for what she said about me.”

In a panic and desperate to see Molly, Will didn’t even pause to consider what Hannibal was referring to. He couldn’t even remember if he’d informed Hannibal of Molly’s misgivings about him. He set down his mug on the bedside table, pulled back the covers and swung his legs out of bed. He remembered how exposed he felt and tried not to blush at the way the fabric bunched up around his thighs and groin, revealing far more than he’d like. Uneasily, he placed his hands over a couple of old cigarette burns that had aged into light brown kisses of scar tissue under the black hair.

“Where are my clothes?” he asked, looking around frantically. Hannibal walked over to a nearby chair and picked up his folded clothes where a pair of shoes sat on top. Will snatched them up and immediately started pulling them on. He paused before doing up the buttons of his shirt over the pristinely white t-shirt and paused. “Is this mine?” He pulled at the hem of the shirt and felt the soft cotton slide against his skin.

“That would be mine. Keep it.” Hannibal pulled Will towards him by the flannel shirt and forcibly started doing up his buttons, concealing the t-shirt underneath. Will reflexively allowed Hannibal to dress him, his mind far more occupied with how to explain himself to Molly.

“I’ll get your jacket,” Hannibal said when he was fully-clothed, moving around him to slide the coffee mug onto a coaster. Will was not too pre-occupied to notice his own blunder and hoped it hadn’t left a ring, but Hannibal didn’t seem all too bothered. “You just try to relax and drink up.”

While he was over there, Hannibal pulled out a bottle of medication from seemingly nowhere and left 2 grey, oblong pills beside the mug. Will instantly threw them into his mouth and downed the rest of the hot coffee and though it did not scald him, it still burned as it went down his throat. The syrupy tones left a bitter taste in his mouth. His lips tingled as he pressed them together and something at the back of his mind caused his chest to constrict, like being reminded of a bad dream but not entirely sure of what or why.

Hannibal hurried him out the door, into the car and back to his place, pulling into a parking space outside the building and stopping to turn and look at Will. “You neglected to mention last night that the reason you came to me was because you’d had an argument with your wife.”

“Did I? I don’t remember.” Will’s tone was nonchalant. “Maybe I just forgot to say.”

“Salvaging your relationship is obviously important to you, Will. I cannot guarantee that you won’t be walking right into a divorce if you go inside right now.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Will asked bewilderedly, thinking that Hannibal had quite neatly diffused the situation already.

“It means that you’re not well and I worry more about how closing off your relationship may affect your mental health than I do about you hurting your wife. If you find yourself struggling to cope, it may be a good idea to stay with me for a couple of days.”

The suggestion made Will blush, though he could not entirely say why. Although a part of him leapt to accept the offer, it felt like a defeat, so he only said, “I’m not that far gone, Hannibal. I think I’d need to be a lot worse before I’d leave my wife. So as long as you’re still there for me…” He trailed off, not really wanting to imagine a world without Hannibal at that moment in time. It struck him how totally antagonistic to his goal that feeling was. Ultimately, he should want to no longer require Hannibal’s therapy, but currently he craved it like a drug and didn’t intend to go to rehab any time soon.

“Of course. I was only letting you know that you have another option.” Hannibal’s hand landed briefly on his as he said, “I’ll be there for you.” Then it retracted. The short burst of relief felt surreal though and Will suddenly felt claustrophobic in the car, like there were unsaid words and he was supposed to finish the conversation without a proper script. So he bolted.

Will thanked Hannibal with a quick squeeze on the shoulder before rushing inside and up the stairs, all the way to his front door. Suddenly, it seemed as daunting as the first time he’d stood before it. He had no clue what awaited him on the other side.

As it happened, it was a warm pair of arms. They were thrown around him almost the second he entered and he was enveloped in a loving embrace. Molly held tightly and devotedly and he held her with equal affection, lifting her feet off the ground slightly as he held her body against his.. He missed her smell, like sandalwood and smoke with that honey shampoo she always used. It smelled like home.

Everything is going to be okay, Will thought. Finally, everything would be okay.

Until the voice started shrieking, loud and piercing like an axe head hurled through the front door and emerging like Jack Nicholson intruding upon their intimate moment. He pulled back suddenly with a quiet gasp, like he was struggling to breathe. The Voice was louder and rougher than ever, not even strung into coherent sentences but just acrid words spat into his ears and sharp nails dragging up and down the skin on his back.

“You came back to beat, kill, _strangle_ ,” it cackled, gargling on its own sick delectation as Will shook and Molly tried to grab his hands and meet his eyes.

“Will? Will, are you all right? You look–”

“I’m fine,” Will lied, glancing between her concerned face and his shoes in rapid sequence. “I’ll be fine. I need some rest.”

He quickly extracted himself, then scampered to the bedroom and fell onto the bed, wrapping himself up into a tight ball and screaming internally while the Voice barked heinous commands at him from all angles. “Suzanne,” he began, hissing the mantra and thinking only of Hannibal, trying to conjure up his hands and their firm touch on his hands and neck using only the power of his imagination. “Master Song. Winter Lady.”

As he spoke, he heard Molly enter the room and observe him whispering to himself for a couple of minutes. She didn’t move or try to approach him, only watched. He heard her sniff loudly before she left and he returned to focusing on his coping method, eventually managing to sedate the Voice enough to drift off into a deep sleep.

In his nightmares, Hannibal’s face seemed to loom over his constantly, like it was the sky itself. Will was trying to climb a mountain to reach up and touch him, but no matter how far he climbed, he was always seeming to fall slightly short of touching the other man’s face.

~

Will paced up and down the waiting room, his ears filled with words: _cut_ , _kill_ , _cunt_ , _rape_ , _bitch_ , _stab_ , _whore_. Every single one of them was a sharp knife through his heart and every single one of them brought with it an image of Molly’s corpse and his own hands firmly around her neck, crushing down on it with all his force. The thoughts had Will on the verge of tears, praying for respite as he walked in circles outside Hannibal’s door and willed time to move faster.

“You’re just so breakable,” it cackled from beside him, following him around the room, no matter where he went, “I just want to snap you in two. I’m gonna feed on your sweet brains, Will. I’m gonna eat your flesh, the same way you’re going to eat your whore of a wife’s flesh.”

“Suzanne, Master Song, Winter Lady,” Will started to recite under his breath.

_“You’re going to go home tonight and kill her while she pleads for mercy and as she takes her dying breath—”_

“The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy,” Will continued, now louder and clearer, while his voice wavered and the tears finally began to fall from his eyes in pain and frustration.

_“Stop trying to forget about me.”_

“So Long, Marianne. Hey, That’s No Way To Say Good—”

“Will?”

Silence. Beautiful silence.

Will immediately ran to where Hannibal stood in the open doorway, having not even noticed his other patient exit and slip out noiselessly. Instinctively, Will collapsed against the other man, nuzzling his face into the warmth of his chest like a mother’s young crawling blindly towards her body to suckle at her breast. Hannibal was initially taken aback, before he accepted the intimacy and placed his hand on Will’s head, stroking through the long curls soothingly.

“It’s okay, Will. I’m here now,” he comforted as Will silently wept into his suit. He hadn’t meant to let any tears escape, but the moment suddenly felt overwhelming and it was as if a tidal wave had crashed down on him, sweeping him up in a cascade of salty water and emotional debris.

They remained this way in the doorway until Will had calmed down and he pulled reluctantly away from Hannibal, seeing where his hot tears had left a dark patch on his chest. “Shit, I’m sorry,” he mumbled and looked down in shame, feeling utterly broken and useless and stupid.

“It’s fine. I needed to take this one to the dry cleaners anyway. Would you like to come in?”

Will nodded and entered solemnly as if he was on his way into a funeral and wouldn’t be surprised to find his own body lying dead in the casket.

“I’m a complete mess, aren’t I?” he moaned, falling limply back into his chair and letting his head loll back, closing his eyes and pressing his fingers to this temples in anguish. There was hushed breathing as Hannibal seemed to be searching for the right words, which Will took as an affirmative and laughed bitterly.

“Don’t worry. You don’t need to lie to me. I know I’m fucked. It just keeps getting worse and the only time it’s okay is when I’m around you.”

“That’s better than nothing, isn’t it?”

“Not when I’m trying sleep next to my wife, but god, all I want is to call you and hear your voice…”

“I’ve told you that you can any time."

“At this rate, I may as well just live with you,” Will joked, but as he said it, it struck him that it wasn’t a terrible idea. He almost yearned for it, to be constantly in Hannibal’s presence, constantly at peace and not at the mercy of his own mind.

“But I’m afraid this session is all that we have for the time being.” Hannibal’s words took his delusion by the back of the head and drowned it mercilessly. He shouldn’t have expected anything else. “Would you like to try hypnotic therapy?”

Will nodded timorously and followed Hannibal to the reclining couch that lay perpendicular to the windows and sat down with his body turned to face Hannibal’s. Will was now accustomed to their ritual as he offered out his hand and Hannibal placed his larger, surer hand underneath it and holding onto his palm while his other hand moved up to cup the side of Will’s face. He breathed fresh air for the first time in days. He’d been drowning, choking on the water as it filled up his lungs, until that moment.

Will let Hannibal’s hands slide over his body, one stroking back and forth on his lower arm as if he was drawing a bow delicately across a violin, producing a beautiful resonance that only he could hear. Every minute movement of the bow produced a sigh from the violin, every single sigh was a symphony to him.

Hannibal’s other hand slid down Will’s jaw, then back up around his ear, twisting into his hair as if it was running through a lion’s mane, the tufts of brown locks slipping easily into the grooves between his fingers. It was as smooth as running sand, like silken ribbons being pulled through the eye of a needle.

Increasingly, Will became very aware of how excruciatingly erotic the scene was, but was too caught up in all its pleasurable sensations to bother becoming concerned by it. He felt like a cheating lover whose guilt would only be postponed until after the ardent affair, then it would hit him like a ton of bricks. It was only when the hands withdrew that Will found himself flustered. Had that really just happened? Wasn’t he a little turned on? Semi-hard almost?

He coughed awkwardly and got up off the couch to return to his armchair, refusing to look Hannibal in the eyes. Hannibal followed suit casually and Will wondered if he’d felt it too. He gave nothing away with either his body language or facial expression, though that was often the case with him.

Will thought back to the last time he’d had sex with Molly and it had been familiar and easy, laughing and joking amidst the kissing and fucking. In fact, their sex had always been a casual affair, in which they could talk easily about it afterwards and find enjoyment in the affability of it all.

But when was the last time it had been dark and steamy, like a fire sparking and crackling while the lurid flames danced brightly against the black? He remembered a man called Matthew who he met one night in Washington and drove him the full hour back to his place, where Will’s hands were tightly bound behind his back and they drove their bodies together like wild animals, passionate and reckless and so, so hot…

He inconspicuously studied Hannibal from across the room and couldn’t help but imagine how he might fuck; how he would lick and suck and bite and—

His face burned.

“Was that helpful to you, Will?” Hannibal asked, cutting through Will’s embarrassing fantasy.

What would it feel like to make love while Hannibal’s hands caressed him like that?

“I, uh… I think I’m only managing to cope because… Because I get to talk to you. If I couldn’t talk to you every day, I don’t know what might happen. I’d probably lose it,” Will joked anxiously, yet every word was spoken in earnest.

“You don’t need to worry about that, Will.”

Hannibal smiled at him, oblivious to the images that were playing out in Will’s head. Or at least Will hoped that he was oblivious.

~

Hannibal had abandoned him. That was the only answer, for sure. He’d gotten bored, tired, frightened maybe, and just fucked off, good riddance. As Will stood outside Hannibal’s, he panicked that perhaps Hannibal had been aware of Will’s sordid thoughts in their last session and been alarmed and disturbed by them.

“He can’t read minds,” Will reminded himself out loud.

“But I can,” a snickering voice whispered into his ear, causing Will to groan loudly and cover his ears, perfectly aware of how futile the gesture was, “and I have to say that those were some pretty raunchy thoughts you had. Can’t say I blame you.”

Will shook his head defiantly. He wasn’t going to go there. “Suzanne, Master Song, Winter Lady.”

_“Oh, fuck me, Hannibal! Your cock is so big!”_

Will screwed his eyes shut. “The Stranger Song, Sisters of Mercy, So Long, Marianne.”

_“This is so much better than my sleazy wife!”_

Will leapt up and started hammering on Hannibal’s front door with his fists. “LET ME IN!” he cried in desperation, but to no avail as the Voice laughed cruelly. He checked the time on his phone, then again on his watch. It was 6pm. It was a Tuesday. He called Hannibal yet again, but nobody answered.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“You’re going mad, Will. Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, I’m not.”

“Says the man talking to himself in the middle of the street…”

Will sat down on the steps, folded his arms around his knees and determined to wait.

“It’s freezing out here. You can’t seriously be able to expected to wait here until Hannibal shows up.”

“Watch me.”

“I’d rather not watch you die of pneumonia.”

“Why? Would you miss having someone to torture?”

“I’ve never wanted you to come to any harm.”

Will let out a short laugh, then said nothing.

“Why not just drive to his office?”

Will didn’t want to admit that it was a much better idea (and certainly much more appealing) than sitting on the porch like a dejected, lost puppy. He gave in, however, when he started to feel the tips of his fingers going numb.

After high-tailing it all the way up to Hannibal’s office, he was shocked to find that too had been closed down, with the door to the waiting room locked and the hallway in darkness. Startled, Will began racing around the building, looking for someone to talk to but the entire place seemed abandoned. All the while, the Voice mocked him for his desperation.

Eventually, he came across an older woman who appeared to be going home and he ran up to her, giving her a fright when he tapped her on the shoulder. She jumped and proceeded to look at him with curiosity and he realised he must have looked like a complete train wreck, his eyes wide and his hair dishevelled while his hands twisted nervously in front of him.

“Do you have any idea where Hannibal is?” he asked impatiently, his voice low and scratchy.

“Dr Lecter? He doesn’t have any appointments right now.” Will’s despair must have been evident on his face because she paused in the midst of turning around and asked, “Do you need to speak to someone?”

Someone meant a Doctor. Not a Doctor who cared about him, like Doctor Lecter, but a Doctor who just wanted to see him locked up in a mental institution.

Will was on the brink of tears as he shook his head.

“No, no, I’m fine,” he said, though blatantly lying, then waited for her to leave before falling against a wall and sliding despondently to the floor. “He hates me,” Will wept, burying his face in his hands.

~

The sudden withdrawal of Hannibal’s care was everything Will feared it would be. Days passed without any form of communication and Will worsened. After collapsing back into bed on Thursday evening, he buried himself under the covers, ignoring Molly entirely, and slept for so long that he lost track of time. He’d open his eyes and see light, then close them again and they would reopen to total darkness.

He wore the shirt that Hannibal had given him, hoping to draw something from the vague scent that clung to it, but as he sweated into it, it only started to smell more and more like him.

The Voice woke him up screaming, but every call to Hannibal produced a dial tone, so Will downed more pills as if they were his only form of sustenance (in fact, they were) and went back to bed. He couldn’t move from bed, he couldn’t bear the idea of having to face reality without Hannibal’s support.

Molly knew to avoid him. He heard her crying in the other room when she didn’t think he could hear. But he could, he just couldn’t muster up the energy to care.

Then finally, he got a call.

He did not know the day or the hour, only that it was dark outside and he reeked of body odour and slow death. The Voice was lowly muttering to him, like a radio in the background that he both ignored and was driven mad by in equal amounts.

“Hannibal?” he asked desperately as soon as he picked up. He hadn’t exercised his vocal chords in days and what came out was a pained rasp.

“Will, thank god.” He almost burst spontaneously into tears at the sound of Hannibal’s voice, but restrained the tsunami of emotions and instead just pressed the phone so tightly against his ear that he could have been trying to phase the object through his skull. He wanted to push himself through the phone line and land in Hannibal’s lap at the other end. “I’ve been worried about you. Where were you on Tuesday? Where were you tonight?”

“I’m sorry, I lost track of time,” Will said, now struggling to sit up and wondering if he could still speed over to Hannibal’s office. “I was there on Tuesday, but you didn’t answer the door.” He wasn’t being accusatory, although he maybe should have sounded more indignant. Somehow, he’d ended up blaming himself for Hannibal’s absence.

“I assure you, Will, I was at my house waiting for you.”

Will froze. How was that possible?

“No, the door was locked. The lights were off.” He found himself mentally running through the night and trying to remember every minute detail. Had he fabricated the whole night? Had he shown up at the wrong time or on the wrong day? The more he thought about it, the hazier it all became and he started to doubt himself.

“Are you okay, Will?” Hannibal asked as Will appeared to have been quiet for slightly too long. They were accustomed to comfortable silences in each other’s company, but this one definitely felt strained.

“No,” Will said almost inaudibly. “Why didn’t you pick up?”

“What?” Hannibal sounded totally oblivious and Will’s insecurity doubled in size.

“When I called you, why didn’t you pick up?” Will cried out wretchedly.

There was a beat of silence. “Will, you never called me.”

“Yes. I did.” His assertion sounded firm and confident, but he was starting to lack any form of conviction in his own mind.

“I can assure you, you didn’t.”

Will pulled the phone away from his ear and immediately went to his call logs. There hadn’t been a call made since Monday evening. Was his grip on reality really getting so bad?

“I need to see you,” Will said urgently, hurriedly getting out of bed for the first time in days.

“Will, I can’t. Not tonight. I have an appointment in only a few minutes.”

Will slowed himself and sat back down on the bed.

“When?” He couldn’t disguise the heartbreak and betrayal from his voice. Yet again, he selfishly wanted to Hannibal’s top priority, his only patient.

“I’ll tell you as soon as I know, but I have a very busy weekend coming up.”

Will’s head swooned at the prospect of another few days without contact and he slumped back onto the bed disconsolately. Hannibal waited patiently for him to process the information on the other end. He pictured his skull flooded with insanity once again, the fluid around his brain overflowing and seeping out through his eyes, ears nose and mouth like a gruesome, oozing corpse.

“I haven’t seen you in a whole week. I can’t— I don’t know if I’ll be able to—” Will stammered, clutching frantically at his hair and pulling it just a little too tight.

“You will be fine, Will. Just please, call me next time.”

“I will,” he replied, but his voice sounded alien.

He buried his face back into his pillow and awaited the Voice’s return now that Hannibal was gone.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Oh man, I'm sorry but I'm also even more sorry for the next chapter.
> 
> But this was actually one of my favourite chapters to write so far. More for Will's arousal than his subsequent breakdown though...
> 
> I have decided to add another chapter before the very last for reasons and hopefully you'll see why and agree with my decision once you get there. But it will probably end up being over 50000 words, which feels really impressive for me! I can't believe that I'm so close to actually finishing a story for the first time in my life and it will probably be completed by February. Yay!


	11. Breaking Point

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for violence. (I'm sorry.)

It was Saturday evening and Will forced himself to finally emerge from his room to feed himself. Molly had been surreptitiously leaving glasses of water by his bedside, but he was beginning to feel his ribs protruding formidably when he lay down and realised that needed real food. He could see that the last shades of light were still lingering outside, but that sunset he once thought was so beautiful only seemed to spit at him as he walked past. The world seemed to despise him. Not that he would blame it — he despised himself in equal measure.

46 hours. It had been 46 hours since he’d spoken to Hannibal and not for a lack of trying. Although he had warned Will that he would have a busy weekend, Will wasn’t quite prepared for what that meant. Surely, he wasn’t doing anything when Will called him in the early hours of the morning? Was he lying about still wanting to help him, or did he just consider him beyond all assistance by that point? While it was the last thing Will wanted to admit, it was the first thing he leapt to believe. The idea weaselled its way into his brain and grew there like a tenacious cancer, feeding off his insanity until he no longer believed that he even existed. He was just an empty vessel with no purpose or meaning. He may as well let himself slowly waste away to nothingness, return to the stagnant water that his kind were born on. He was parasitic, draining the good from the world and leaving it swollen and oozing — an ugly, cracked blister.

Molly had been his motivation to get better. But now she only served as motivation not to get worse. He now urged himself to eat just so that he wouldn’t resort to consuming her flesh raw in a fit of ravenous hunger as the Voice screamed at him to eat her alive. The image was always there at the back of his mind, somehow becoming increasingly tempting with each passing hour without the sound of Hannibal’s voice to help him.

_“What would her skin taste like? What would the muscle feel like between your teeth? Would you strip every last bit of flesh from the bone? Suck at the ligaments? Gnaw on the cartilage?”_

He’d hoped that Molly would be sleeping on the sofa as she had taken to doing, or maybe she’d gone out for some unknown reason. But instead, he faced her in the kitchen, her sleeves rolled up to the elbows and soaking with soapy water as she cleaned the dishes over the full sink.

“Drown her in it!” the Voice screeched and Will’s face screwed up with more pain than anything else as the noise inside his head reached a thundering cacophony of high-pitched squawking underlined by low rumbles like lions who were about to pounce on their pray of screeching birds. He stumbled backwards slightly and hit the door, making his presence known. Molly looked up in surprise. She dropped the plate she was holding at the edge of the sink and froze, staring in disbelief. Her face was scared, then relieved, then didn’t seem to know what emotion it wanted to portray. But they stood petrified in time and space, eyeing each other up suspiciously.

As her lips parted, Will knew she was about to speak and the Voice wouldn’t like it as he felt it starting to wind around him like a thick boa constrictor, slowly suffocating him. So he tried to escape, but he was paralysed, his body stiff as a block of wood while the Voice coiled tighter and tighter around his now useless limbs.

“We need to talk, Will,” Molly sighed quietly, approaching him with her hands raised as if she was trying to capture a rabid animal. Will still backed away, starting to shake with fear at what might come next while the Voice sniggered in the back of his head. Something terrible was about to happen… “I know this is all because Dr Lecter hasn’t talked to you in a few days. This isn’t healthy. It needs to stop. You cannot be this reliant on his care, it’s not reasonable.”

He was surprised that Molly still had her doubts about him, believing that Hannibal had proven himself to her after their last argument when he returned him safely home. But the surprise was overshadowed by resentment. Hannibal was the only person who made it bearable, who kept him vaguely sane. The Voice seemed to agree.

_“Hannibal’s going to take care of you.”_

“Hannibal’s going to take care of me,” Will repeated, spitting out each word venomously. He wanted them to hurt her. He was overcome by an urge to see her cry. Balling his hands into fists, he attempted to repress it. Stiff and filled with rising tension, his body started to shake.

“What has gotten into you, Will?” she suddenly blurted out, losing her temper briefly, then withdrawing in an attempt to gather her composure. She leaned back against the sink and pulled her arms into herself protectively, as if she too could feel the pressure rising inside Will.

“Nothing’s gotten into me,” he spoke, his voice trembling. The grip around him continued to constrict, crushing his internal organs.

_“I was here all along.”_

“It was there all along.” Will recited the words back monotonously, his eyes focused on a point behind Molly, boring blankly into that one point.

“This needs to end,” she said firmly and her arms crossed over her chest in some gesture of asserting finality, but Will was no longer susceptible to her words. Her happiness, her feelings, they meant nothing to him now. All he wanted was Hannibal to come and pick him up in his arms and carry him away forever.

“Leave me alone,” he muttered, his voice becoming choked as the intangible grip wound tighter around his throat. Frustrated that he hadn’t managed to get his food, he decided to give up, turning round and determining to return to his bed for another day or so.

But Molly wasn’t having any of it. She finally reached breaking point. Unfortunately, it was just as Will reached his.

“No!” she cried out defiantly, lunging for him to snatch his arm and haul him back into the kitchen, but the grip around him finally released and all of Will’s built up tension released in one blow. Like an elastic band that had been stretched to its limits and finally released, Will whirled round and threw his knuckles hard into her face with all his force, sending her flying backwards into the worktop. Gasping in appalled shock at his own actions, Will pulled his hand back to his side with all his force, horrified at himself. His ears filled with static and the only other sound he could just barely hear beneath it was his heart pumping, racing much faster than normal. His entire body wracked violently as he fought the hands that pulled and pushed at him, urging him to leap on her and crush her skull with his bare hands.

Molly’s small frame picked itself up off the ground and a delicate hand rose to her reddened cheek as her face turned to look at Will again, her eyes brimming with heartbreak and betrayal. But her bottom lip did not tremble. It stood defiantly still.

As if his straight jacket had suddenly been released, he slipped off the Voice’s influence and rushed to her side, crying, “Oh god! Oh god, Molly, I am so sorry! I am so sorry, Molly. I don’t—” He reached out for her face but she backed away, terrified, pushing herself along the floor with one elbow as her hand still graced her swollen cheek and she looked at Will in horror. Did she finally look past him and see the disgusting beast inside? The part of him he’d always been so careful not to let her see… He felt hot tears starting to flood his cheeks and he bit his lip until blood flooded his mouth.

“I am calling the Police,” she stated firmly, though her voice was rough and choked, “and when they come, I am going to tell them that you need to be sectioned immediately.”

“Hannibal warned you,” the Voice hissed thinly, wriggling studiously back into his mind. Will shook his head violently, as if he was trying to shake water out of his ears, but he could already feel the forces slipping into his body like it was an empty suit, filling him with its own desires, taking control.

Before he was aware of it, Will had leapt on top of Molly and was straddling her between his knees as his hands crushed down on her windpipe. She gasped horrendously and flailed around beneath him, her eyes bulging from their sockets and her face turning purple. He was strangulating her.

“I’m so sorry!” Will continued to weep as his hands were forced downwards. He couldn’t even distinguish between the force applied by the Voice and the strength he was trying to fight it with. Was he even trying to fight it? He only knew that he had no hope of defeating it. He sat on her writhing body and plead for her to just be still, to be over with it as soon as—

There was a sharp pain at the back of his head and shards of white porcelain rained down over his head and onto Molly’s face to the harsh sound of a plate smashing against the back of his skull. Her eyes widened briefly, mildly surprised by what she’d done, but she didn’t waste time thereafter. As Will slumped over and his grip loosened enough for her to slip free, she forced him off her and stumbled to her feet while Will’s ears still rang. He saw the blur as she pushed past him and hightailed to the door. Cursing himself and not sure whose whim he was currently following, he hurriedly got to his feet as she raced out of the room and Will was fast on her tail, despite his withering body mass.

Perhaps if that plate hadn’t been covered in washing up liquid, she may have escaped. But as it was, she couldn’t find a grip on the door knob and Will his arms swaddling her from behind and hauling her kicking and screaming back into the apartment. He’d never felt more of a disgusting monster.

_“Now kill her! Kill her and eat her delicate flesh!”_

“Shut up!” Will roared back, throwing Molly’s body down to the floor where she landed in a sprawl. Immediately, she began crawling back to the front door as she whimpered in fear, but Will grabbed her by the ankles and dragged her back along the floor, even as her nails tried hopelessly to dig into the wooden floorboards. When she was back within his reach, he paused and looked down at her cowering in terror while the Voice hounded him to commit unspeakable acts. “I can’t let you do this, Molly. I don’t want to kill you, but I can’t let you send me to the Psych Ward. I can’t let you take me away from him.” Will uttered the last words in a hoarse whisper and saw her eyes widen.

Will forcibly turned her over and grabbed her wrists, thankfully still stronger than her, even when he hadn’t eaten a proper meal in days. She was soon bound and tied to the table with a sturdy leather belt that Will had last worn when he first visited Hannibal’s house. He needed Hannibal then. He sat on the floor near her, curled up on himself and threatening her with a knife he’d retrieved from the kitchen every time she tried to scream for help, while his other hand held his phone and dialled Hannibal’s number on repeat for about 30 minutes straight.

“Why won’t he answer?” Will exclaimed eventually, while Molly’s tears had been reduced to defeated sniffling. Frustrated, he angrily tossed the phone across the room and watched it collide with the wall, breaking into various parts. He cursed himself, cursed the Voice, cursed Hannibal. His grip around the handle of the knife tightened and he directed the pointed tip right at Molly’s pulsating jugular. “Just one little nick,” he mused. “A small cut and you’d bleed out. I could slice my wrists. We’d die together and they’d find our decomposing bodies in a few days. Newspapers would print stories about the tragic tale of a young couple destroyed by mental illness and violence and you’d be praised for being so gentle and kind and I’d be hated passionately for being evil.”

“You’re not evil, Will,” Molly said meekly and Will snorted, watching like a removed observer as he let the sharp point of the knife drag against the skin but didn’t apply any pressure.

“You married a monster, Molly. It was just wearing a clever disguise,” Will said acrimoniously and an unseen force jerked his hand. Molly yelped in pain as the blade slashed across her cheek and blood poured from the wound. “I didn’t mean to do that!” Will gasped, jumping backwards and seeing the first drops of blood slide along the edge of the knife like rain dripping down a window.

His hands were trembling suddenly, his heart was thumping, his breaths were heavy and strained like rocks were crushing his chest.

_“Finish the job.”_

Will saw the world go in and out of focus. What was the point in fighting this battle anymore? He readjusted his hand to the sweaty handle of the knife. Then he descended on her, bloodlust raging behind his eyes and throughout his head.

“Will, stop!”

Hannibal’s voice was like an arrow that had been shot by a skilled archer. It sliced through the air like lightning and met its target with perfect precision, entering Will’s arm and pinning it in place.

Will refused to look. He kept his eyes firmly locked on Molly. He had to do it.

“I need you to look at me, Will.”

Will’s focus on Molly’s bloody face was broken as his gaze flickered over to where Hannibal stood near the door way, his hands held up submissively, then they returned to the blade that was shaking in his hand. A drop of blood fell to the floor and landed on the hard oak with a loud plop, like a small stone being dropped.

“Stabby stabby time, Will!” the Voice hissed gleefully and pulled at his wrist so that the knife jerked towards Molly’s throat and she let out a horrified scream, desperately trying to pull away from her restraints.

“Please, Molly! I need you to be quiet!” Will screamed, shaking the knife at her and seeing the room’s reflection and his own harrowed face flash in its silver blade. He blinked rapidly, trying to focus.

“She’ll be silent as soon as you cut the bitch’s throat.” Will saw himself lunging at her, repeatedly hacking and slicing at the skin and drenching him in her wet blood, but when he blinked the vision was gone and he was still only pointing the shaking knife at her throat while she blubbered and wept and begged. “Slice her open, drink her blood, kill—”

“Will!” Hannibal’s voice cut right through the commotion in Will’s head and pulled him back, if only briefly, to reality. Turning to look at him, Will saw that he was gradually edging closer and slowly pulling off the leather glove on his right hand. Will swung the blade round to point at him.

“D-don’t come any c-closer,” he threatened, his voice faltering as the hand holding the knife tremored uncontrollably. Hannibal stopped, but was now close enough to gently reach out and got to the point where his hand was hovering over the top of the blade before Will screeched, “No!” and slashed the silver through the air, quickly followed by a flash of red as the sharp edge lacerated Hannibal’s hand. The pain showed clearly on his face for a couple of short seconds as he winced before he pulled himself together and focused on Will again, who was now breathing erratically and trembling so hard that he looked as if he was about to have a seizure.

“What’s wrong with him? Why is he doing this?” Molly cried out desperately. Without flinching, Hannibal reached over bashed her head against the table causing her to collapse in an unconscious heap. Will was now looking at the psychiatrist in confusion, unsure of what he’d just seen. The picture of Hannibal callously smashing her skull against the table’s edge blurred and metamorphosed into himself doing the same. He saw his hand grabbing her, felt her hair as he threw her against the hard surface.

“You need to drop the knife, Will, before you hurt your wife again,” Hannibal stated evenly, then took another step forward, into the path of Will’s wavering knife.

Will blinked rapidly, glancing between Hannibal and Molly in quick succession and seeing Hannibal knock her out, but then caught flashes of himself doing it. Tears were clouding his vision and he couldn’t think straight, didn’t know what was real and what wasn’t.

Hannibal braved the blade again, but was quicker this time and caught hold of Will’s wrist, closing his entire hand around it and holding it totally still.

 _That touch_ , his anchor. Will had been tethered like a wild bird and Hannibal began the process of reeling him back in. The entire world swung in and out of focus, blotchy and dark and then blindingly light, but there was silence. Silence and the calm feeling of Hannibal’s hand on his wrist, then the other at the back of his neck. They were cool against his feverish skin, like running ice over a burn and Will breathed out a shuddering breath of relief.

Without hesitation, almost instinctively, Will fell against Hannibal’s body, dropping the knife with a heavy clang. Hannibal accepted him openly and folded an arm around the small of his back, pinning their torsos together. Disregarding the presence of his wife tethered to the table leg, Will immediately moved his lips to meet Hannibal’s, desperate for more intimacy, to feel closer and safer. Hannibal seemed to react immediately, moving the hand on Will’s neck up into his hair, twisting it between his fingers and igniting a passion in Will that he barely knew existed inside him. He wanted to go deeper, clinging to Hannibal with all his might, digging his fingers into his coat and wanting skin to be on skin.

Then Hannibal pulled away. Will attempted to follow him, but was held back.

“I’m sorry,” he said with genuine regret. In a flash, he twisted Will around and forced his head down against the table, catching his wrists behind his back even as he tried to wrangle away. “You’re a danger to yourself and to your wife right now. I’m going to have to restrain you for your own good.”

Will suddenly felt the weight of his actions and let out a choked cry before his body went slack and he allowed Hannibal to confine him. “I understand,” he murmured softly, his voice breaking as he said it.

From behind him, Hannibal deftly undid his tie with one hand and used it to fasten Will’s wrists behind his back. His hands were gentle and the material was soft, but the bindings were still tight and secure. He then pulled Will back onto his feet and he stood there uncertainly, feeling ashamed and deeply unhinged.

“I’m going to untie your wife and explain the situation to her when she wakes up. Everything. I think it might be best if you stay with me for a while.”

Will nodded but he was embarrassed. Had he not just tried to kiss Hannibal a minute ago? Had Hannibal kissed back or forced him away? Or just used it as an excuse to detain him? He couldn’t quite recall… It was all so fuzzy…

“I’ll take you down to my car, but it’s best if you just sit down for now.”

Will paused a second before asking, “Why didn’t you answer?”

Hannibal looked at him, utterly confused. “What do you mean?”

“I called you. But you didn’t answer.”

“You never called me, Will. I was the one who called you. I was worried. But you didn’t pick up.”

Will felt as if he’d had the wind knocked out of him. He started questioning his sanity. “I am insane, Hannibal, aren’t I?” His voice broke.

“We’ll talk about this later, Will,” Hannibal replied evasively.

So Will sat and watched as Hannibal untied Molly and lifted her limp body, carrying her to the bedroom.

That was supposed to be him, Will realised as he watched them go. He was meant to overcome it again, like he did with Bethany. The good in him was supposed to conquer the evil and kill it and he was meant to rescue her. But he couldn’t even save his own wife from himself. Hannibal had to do it for him. Hannibal had to save him from his demons yet again. It occurred to him then that maybe he was running in the wrong direction. Maybe this time he wouldn’t be able to overpower it because he didn’t have the good left inside him anymore. Maybe his only purpose was to become a hollowed out shell, left to be consumed by the Voice and its evil.

It was a long while before Will heard murmurs coming for the bedroom, and then gentle sobs which made his stomach turn and his chest want to cave in on itself. Finally, Hannibal exited the bedroom and crouched in front of Will, placing a hand on both his knees and leaning closely in to his face.

“She understands. She’s upset, but she understands why you didn’t tell her and why you have to leave. Do you want to say goodbye?”

Will shook his head hastily. “I just want to leave. But… I don’t know if I can walk…” Will’s body still trembled and his hands and feet felt numb with shock.

“That won’t be a problem,” Hannibal said gently, moving one hand to stroke Will’s cheek affectionately and Will leaned in to the touch, desperate for as much contact with Hannibal as he could. He almost whimpered when Hannibal pulled his hand away, then stood up and moved behind him, crouching to untie Will’s bindings. Behind him, Will felt Hannibal gently massage his wrists, before wasting no time in scooping him up into his arms. Will relinquished himself to the embrace, curling into Hannibal’s chest and nuzzling his face into the crook of his neck. He breathed in the musky scent and it now felt more like home than apartment 3B, or his house in Wolf Trap, or even Molly’s skin. It was thick and soothing and familiar. It was exactly where he wanted to be.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, this was difficult to write... But in the original draft of this story, I was going to have Hannibal use Will to kill Molly and then eat her. So it could be worse.
> 
> Thank you to all my readers :) Can't believe there's only 3 chapters left!


	12. Wrath And Rapture

“I have a surprise for you, Will.”

Will’s eyelids inched open. He was immediately aware that he was once again in Hannibal Lecter’s guest room, though he could hardly have forgotten the night before and the events that led to him being there. There was no blissful ignorance between sleeping and waking up — every conscious and unconscious moment since had been plagued by horrid reminders of what he had done, be it the screams ringing in his ears or the images etched permanently into his brain.

He ignored Hannibal’s words and closed his eyes again, solemnly longing to be returned to the inertia of his twisted dreams, for even they seemed more attractive than reality.

But he was suddenly spurned to rise again when he felt a crushing weight land on the centre of his chest, winding him briefly. Then a long, thick tongue swiped across his face. Then another one, and another one.

He laughed despite himself and opened his eyes to see every single one of his dogs excitedly pawing at him and jumping up and down excitedly over the bed. Their eyes were wide with madness and exhiliration as their jaws lolled stupidly and their bodies spasmed with joy at being reunited with their master. Giggling foolishly, Will let them shove their wet noses into his face and neck, while he blindly reached out to rub their coats and hug them to him. He hadn’t realised how much he’d missed them, being so caught up in everything else that had happened. He’d forgotten how happy they made him.

Will’s happiness only increased when he saw Hannibal lounging against the door frame with a wicked smile, holding Buster in his arms. He was dressed down, wearing a periwinkle blue shirt with the top couple of buttons undone and the sleeves rolled up, but he looked as charming as ever. Will hauled himself up into a sitting position as Hannibal approached to deliver Buster into his arms, like a midwife giving a mother her baby for the first time.

Beaming up at him, Will didn’t even need to ask how or why. Hannibal just placed his hand gently on Will’s shoulder and said, “I’m going to take care of you.”

After becoming reacquainted with his dogs, all of them headed down to the kitchen where Hannibal prepared what he called ‘Protein Scramble’ for them all, along with a mug of steaming Sumatran coffee for Will. The dogs were fed in 4 shining silver bowls. Hannibal must have bought them that morning. They felt like a symbol of permanence, which made Will feel vaguely queasy, but he wasn’t sure he could place his finger on why. There was the impending weight of great change in his life yet again — a change that he’d been coming to see as increasingly permanent the more he thought about his actions the night before — but also excitement and contentedness at the idea of no longer having to leave Hannibal’s side or wait in anxiety and fear for his return.

He sipped his coffee and watched Hannibal stride casually around his domain. Will felt as if he stood there in the kitchen as more than a guest, but less than a resident; definitely no longer a patient, yet still under Hannibal’s care.

While analysing the new terms of their relationship, Will was brutally reminded of how he’d found himself attracted to Hannibal just the other day. As they passed knowing glances between each other, Will wondered not for the first time if Hannibal had ever looked at him in that way. Previously, the notion had seemed so ludicrous that he could barely entertain it, but there had always been something between them, hadn’t there? He remembered when their hands first touched and he felt as if Michaelo Angelo himself was responsible; that moment needed to be immortalised on the ceilings of churches and carved out in marble. It was worthy of awe. Hannibal had offered a helping hand and Will had been immediately inclined to throw his entire body at him. Hannibal had enthusiastically accepted the extreme dependency of the relationship and with far less personal benefit than Will. Why?

Oh god.

Hannibal was _in love_ with him.

Will nearly spat out his coffee. Instead, he crouched down to scratch behind Winston’s ears and shot a sly glance at Hannibal, who was silently observing him from across the room. Could that really explain everything? Will’s heart fluttered thinking about it. Then he felt the crushing sense of guilt. _Molly_. That was followed by another wave of guilt. It was lover’s guilt, no doubt — but he wasn’t sure whether he was sympathising with Molly or Hannibal. It should have been Molly, his wife, his poor wife who never deserved to be put through the Hell that he enforced on her. Yet he couldn’t help but feel the twinge of empathetic sorrow for Hannibal, who had been feeding on his heart. Will had offered up raw emotions plentifully for Hannibal to gorge himself on, much like any partner or lover, yet he got nothing in return. Will had found release in him, yet not offered to drain away the emotions that had been building up in Hannibal’s own mind as a consequence of their relationship.

Yet still, Hannibal had always been there for him when he’d called, dedicated right until the end.

Hannibal _did_ love him.

Of course he did.

Standing up suddenly, Will made an excuse to return to his room so he could have a shower. He couldn’t bear for Hannibal to look at him. He couldn’t be the subject of someone else’s yearning. Especially not Hannibal’s. He didn’t deserve it.

As he stood under the hot stream of water, Will cast his mind back to that moment the night before, when he’d fallen into Hannibal’s arms and kissed him as naturally as the moth is drawn to light or the feather is drawn to the wind. He didn’t know why he did it since it hadn’t really been a conscious decision, but he hadn’t even taken exception to it. Not at the time and not afterwards. It felt inconsequentially normal to him, as if they had kissed before.

Only he struggled to remember what Hannibal’s reaction was… He’d been too caught up in the moment, his mind numb from the screaming to really take note of whether he’d reciprocated or not. Either way, the kiss should have changed everything. But it hadn’t changed a thing.

He needed answers.

Fresh out of his shower, Will hastily wrapped a towel around his waist and returned to the bedroom from his conjoined bathroom, only to find Hannibal standing at the wardrobe and putting away clothes. Noticing Will’s return, he smiled wordlessly and just continued to fold away shirts from a suitcase that Will knew he must have picked up from 3B earlier that day. Fidgeting nervously in the door frame, he became painfully aware of his nakedness. Droplets of water from his hair dropped onto his shoulders and ran down his naked torso. Hannibal barely even looked at him.

“Do you love me?”

Will was shocked by his own honest brusqueness with such a delicate question, but he wasn’t the only one as Hannibal also froze for a couple of seconds. Will could only see his face in profile, but noticed that he had stalled, before he quickly gathering himself and turning to face Will.

“Yes.” It was blunt but did not lack any believability. Will nodded contemplatively, as if he had prepared himself for such an answer. He hadn’t prepared himself for any answer. Will wasn’t sure if he’d have preferred a long and detailed declaration of love to the simplistic reply he’d got. Hannibal struck him as the type to employ a richer courtship ritual with greater displays of affection. He saw a man who would have liked to take him out to the opera and buy him expensive works of art and quote sonnets by Dante and Shakespeare in casual conversation. Yet this admission of love came with no flourish, only a period.

“Is that why I’m here?” he questioned, his tone slightly guarded as he ventured into new ground between them. He felt as if they were the Greek and Trojan armies meeting on the planes outside of Ileum’s walls and he had just ventured forth as the first warrior, Achilles, to meet his match, Hector, who emerged from the other crowd of soldiers. They circled each other, beating their shields with their swords and glowering from underneath their bronze helmets.

“No.” Another succinct answer.  Yet again, Will was thrown.

“Then why am I here?”

“Because, Will,” Hannibal said, dropping the folded shirt in his hands back into the suitcase and walking over to him, “you’re under my care and I intend to keep my promise to help you.” He reached out then, but Will backed away warily. He was aware of how compliant Hannibal could make him with just his touch and suddenly the idea of being submissive to Hannibal didn’t feel so comforting anymore. Hannibal read his expression and back away with his hands held up above his head. There was a sadness in his eyes when he said, “You don’t have to fear me.”

Will’s back, which had been tensing up until that point, eased slightly at his words and the broken expression on his face. Of course he didn’t have to fear Hannibal. “I’m sorry.” He wasn’t quite sure what he was apologising for, but it seemed the right thing to say. Awkward and ashamed, he marched right past Hannibal and left the room. He was still only wearing a towel, but his dogs were waiting obediently for him in the kitchen and he sat cross-legged on the floor, allowing them to nuzzle him.

What must Hannibal think of him? Trying to kiss him, then flinching away from him? At least Hannibal was aware of all his own feelings and motivations. He was so collected in a way Will only dreamed to be. He toyed with the idea that he may have allowed himself to empathise too strongly with Hannibal and thereby ended up mirroring his sexual attraction, but he knew there was more to it than that. The attraction was his own to take responsibility for and he had to reign it in if he ever wanted to return to Molly. But now that he knew Hannibal felt the same way… Was there any point in going back?

The thought shocked him so much that he physically recoiled, alarming his dogs slightly.

He _had_ to go back. He needed to get better and go home.

But when he was with Hannibal, he didn’t need to get better and he already felt at home. Life with Molly felt foreign and uncomfortable now, a rapid departing from the sense of familiarity she used to radiate. Now that came from Hannibal. Could it be possible that in the midst of all this, he’d missed himself falling out of love with Molly and in love with Hannibal?

He looked at the dog bowls in the corner, then his coffee mug on the counter. He couldn’t help but marvel at how easily the two of them had slipped into some form of domesticity. Natural, instinctive, easy. He had to fight the urge to give in to that temptation, though. He couldn’t just take the easy route. He didn’t love Hannibal. He did not love Hannibal Lecter. He was unhealthily dependent on him and would be taking steps to sever that dependence as soon as possible so that he could go back to his wife.

He heard Hannibal’s footsteps behind him and stood up briskly, being sure to gather the towel at his hips. The situation felt awkward enough without accidentally flashing Hannibal as well.

“I’m sorry to have put you on the spot, Will.” Hannibal’s introductory words did not beat about the bush. Will considered himself for a second, then looked Hannibal right in the eyes.

“Why?”

“You’re a guest in my house. The last thing I want to do is make you feel uncomfortable.” Hannibal continued to move around the room, as if that may distract Will from the subject matter.

“No,” Will groaned, pressing a distressed hand against his face, “I mean why do you love me?”

“Why do you find the idea that someone might love you so unfathomable?” Hannibal replied, now stopping to look at him directly, seemingly far more comfortable when they were analysing Will’s feelings rather than his own. But Will wouldn’t let himself be nudged away from his original question.

“You didn’t answer my question.”

“I don’t have an answer.” Hannibal shrugged simply, placing his hands on the kitchen counter and bracing himself against it to stare at Will, who waited patiently for him to elucidate and eventually he did. “Man has always attempted to capture emotions with words, caging them in with poetry and prose in an attempt to display them to the world. But the feeling does not need to be seen and scrutinised before it can be appreciated. Free it and let it fly, or else take an arrow and shoot it through the heart, but never trap it.” Hannibal’s voice was soft and honest. Will’s ribs seemed to strain in a way he was quite unfamiliar with. The words were hauntingly beautiful, but also mildly disturbing. There was a bitter taste behind them, perhaps the acrid tinge of unrequited love souring the words? He had to turn away.

“You’ll have to kill it then,” he whispered, moving past Hannibal without making eye contact and back to the guest room. He proceeded to get dressed in the clothes Hannibal had brought from his house and tried not to think about what Molly would be doing at that moment.

When he looked in the mirror, his eyes immediately drifted down to the wedding ring, glinting on his hand like a sick reminder of what he’d done. He resisted the urge to take it off and instead let it burn him.

Later, when Will smelled food cooking, he wandered back down into the kitchen, ready to face Hannibal again but afraid that there might be lingering awkwardness. To his surprise (or maybe it was exactly what he’d expected), Hannibal smiled at him when he entered, glancing up and down and seeming to approve of the fact that he’d gotten dressed. Will hadn’t taken off the shirt that he had given him for days before Hannibal had wrestled it off him last night and put on a fresh one. Will had been immensely grateful, since the last one had started to smell putrid and the new one smelled deeply like Hannibal. He didn’t need it any more though. Every room in the house was steeped in Hannibal’s rich and unique scent. Soon, he would be too.

“Lunch?” Will asked, made confident by Hannibal’s swift dismissal of their earlier conversation.

“Just for you, I’m afraid. I have an appointment at 1:30.”

Will froze.

“You’re leaving me?” He wasn’t ready for that yet. Not again. Not after what had happened the last time Hannibal left him alone (at least when he was fully conscious).

“You’ll be fine.” Will was astounded by the confidence in Hannibal’s voice. He didn’t even look up from the food that he was preparing as he said it. Was he honestly so clueless as to how truly fucked up Will was? Did he need a reminder? Because he was going to get one if he didn’t take any precautions…

“H-how do you know that?” Will stammered, feeling his heartbeat rising and trying to fight down an impending panic attack that he could feel slowly building as his hands and feet started to tingle painfully. “I’ve been fine since last night because you’ve been with me. If you leave, who knows what might happen?”

“I can’t exactly take you with me, Will, and it’s far too short notice to cancel,” Hannibal explained, still painfully unaware of Will’s distress.

“No, but you can make sure I don’t escape.”

“I’ll lock the doors.”

“No, you’ll have to tie me up.”

“I’m not going to do that, Will,” Hannibal said as he pulled the pan off the heat and scraped its contents onto a plate, delivering it to Will who barely even looked at it before setting it down on the counter and grabbing Hannibal’s arm tightly.

“You have to, Hannibal.” Will’s voice shook as he said it. He was uncomfortable with the idea. It felt like asking to be detained or put in a strait jacket and it must have finally reached Hannibal how terrified of his own behaviour he was, because he finally looked up at him and his features immediately softened. Hannibal looked down at the hand on his arm and then back up at Will’s face with his eyes firmly set and not willing to be talked down. He seemed to consider it for a few seconds, then said, “Follow me.”

He led Will up to his bedroom, a far grander affair than Will’s guest room as he had expected, and told him to sit on the bed. He returned less than a minute later with a pair of handcuffs and, given the intensity of their earlier conversation, Will had to repress a mocking comment about Hannibal’s secretly kinky sex life. Instead, he allowed the man to attach both of his wrists to the handcuffs behind his back, winding the chain through one of the metal bars of the headboard.

“I’m only doing this because you asked me to, Will,” he said apologetically, his hand stroking the side of his face and giving Will flashbacks to the night before, but it felt different this time, now that he knew. Every touch of Hannibal’s skin on his was now charged with an undercurrent of something else entirely. The feeling of uneasiness made him want to say sorry yet again, but he said nothing and instead only smiled gratefully at Hannibal, who slid the hand down to the back of his neck and whispered, “Relax. I’ll be back in a few hours.”

Hannibal left the room and Will felt his heart rate begin to rise in anticipation for the Voice’s return. He listened for the sound of the front door and, not long after, the engine of a car, then he waited for the sound that he dreaded above all. But it never came.

Minutes passed, then hours, every second of which Will was on edge, just waiting to feel that cool breath on his neck or a delicate susurration in his ear. He waited and waited to no avail. Had it really disappeared again? Did it consider itself defeated after last night, even though he could not fully overcome it and save Molly himself? Even though he probably would have given into it, had Hannibal not appeared in the nick of time? It made no sense. None at all.

Before he knew it, he heard the front door again and Hannibal was back.

He entered the room, carrying something large and flat in a brown paper bag under his arm. He placed it at the end of the bed before coming to untie Will, who was still trembling and paranoid.

“There was nothing. I don’t… I don’t understand! Why?” Will said in a hushed tone, thinking that it might still be listening to him and only waiting for the right time to rear its ugly head again, at the optimal time to give Will a proper heart attack.

“I’d told you that you’d be all right,” Hannibal said smoothly as he slid Will’s hands free and discarded the handcuffs in a drawer under the bed.

“But why?” Will searched Hannibal’s eyes for some deeper understanding. Hannibal only shrugged.

“My treatment must be doing something right.” He released Will’s hands then and Will almost expected the Voice to make a sudden return right at that moment and tell him to rip Hannibal limb from limb. Of course, it didn’t.

“Am I always going to be waiting for it, though?” he asked as his body’s shaking finally ceased.

“Not if I can help it.” Hannibal then reached for the object he’d left at the end of the bed. “I have another surprise.”

Out of the bag, he pulled a face that Will was once very familiar with.

Will took the record in his hands and gazed at it in awe. “Songs of Leonard Cohen?”

“The last one they had,” Hannibal replied with a proud grin. “I believe I even have an old record player laying around if you’d care to come listen with me.”

Will and Hannibal went back down to the room where he usually administered his touch therapy, where they sat in the dark and talked about his boyhood memories and his nightmarish visions. Will sat on the sofa while Hannibal moved to a nearby cupboard, opening the door with a key and revealing an old, cumbersome turntable on one of the shelves inside. Speakers sat neatly on top of it and he propped them up on either side, blowing a fine layer of dust off of each before setting up the needle. As he lowered it, the crackle of the record could immediately be heard, only sounding out a hissing and clicking sound until the familiar music started. Even after all these years, only catching the music on the radio or in movies sometimes, Will still felt so familiar with the sound, as if he still listened to it all the time.

Hannibal came and sat next to him and together they listened to the mesmerising lyrics; that rumbling voice like sand and honey speaking poetic verses alongside the music. Hannibal knew the order of songs now too, though he could not apply to them the same intimate potency that Will did. So Will listened, but Hannibal watched.

“I want you to create new memories of contentment,” Hannibal said to him in a hushed voice, after standing to turn the record over and sitting back down at the other end of the sofa. “I want to give you another safe memory.”

Will looked across at him from the other end of the sofa and remembered how he would sit on his father’s lap as a small child. Now, he quietly lay down and rested his head against Hannibal’s thigh. Immediately the hand went to his hair and started playing with his curls absent-mindedly. It was Will’s way of saying, “I still trust you,” though he remained silent and listened to a voice he once knew from over two decades ago. Naturally, he relinquished himself to Hannibal, letting him touch his perfect body with his mind.

When the record finally ended after a long period of wailing and whistling, they remained in place for a while, letting the record continue to spin in spite of the silence. They were in a meditative state that was difficult to break. Neither of them wanted to move. But eventually, they had to.

The environment felt dim and tired, like there were others sleeping in the house and they had to keep their movements muffled and their voices quiet so as not to wake anyone. But it was just the two of them and Will was suddenly painfully aware of that fact.

“I’m going to get an early night,” he said in a whisper and Hannibal nodded as Will pulled himself up off the sofa and returned to his room. He’d felt like he should have said something, but when he’d opened his mouth, he only exhaled a breath that he imagined like he’d been holding since that morning. He returned to his room without saying another word and stripped back into the shirt Hannibal had given him last night and the briefs he’d been wearing all day.

After crawling under the covers and feeling distinctly unsatisfied, he heard a knock on the door. Hannibl entered before waiting to be invited in and sat down at the end of Will’s bed with a trepidatious look on his face. In his hand, he held a phone.

“I know you broke yours yesterday,” he explained, “so if you want to call your wife…” His voice then trailed off. They both knew there was a deeper question hidden within Hannibal’s innocent suggestion.

Will hesitated on the edge of a decision. The atmosphere felt as if it was teetering on the edge of a blade and was about to fall either way with just the slightest push. Hannibal was staring at him, and Will caught his eyes move lingeringly from his own eyes down to his lips and back up.

“Goodnight, Dr. Lecter,” Will murmured, then turned away and rested his head against the pillow.

Hannibal seemed to wait for a few moments, before he reached out and squeezed Will’s ankle through the bed sheets, then left the room, switching off the light on his way out. The touch seemed to burn through the covers into his skin in Hannibal’s absence. He tried to think of Molly, but couldn’t without seeing horror he’d inflicted. He tried to think of Songs of Leonard Cohen, sang silently to himself about tea and oranges from China, but it didn’t work. Nothing worked. He tossed and turned and only thought of Hannibal’s touch.

Fuck it.

Will pulled back the covers and padded out into the hallway. It was eerily silent and only just enough light shone through the windows from a keen-eyed moon as Will made his way down the long, long corridor to the door where he was certain Hannibal lay.

He knocked upon it, riding a wave of confidence that he had to take advantage of before it crashed against the shore and had him scurrying back to his bed. There was no answer. He opened it up anyway. When he closed the door behind him, the noise caused Hannibal to stir. Will froze in place.

Hannibal slowly sat up. “Are you okay, Will?” he croaked, reaching over to switch the lamp beside his bed on.

Silently, Will nodded, struggling to say anything at all.

But he didn’t need to as Hannibal understood, getting out of bed and walking over to him. He stopped just out of arm’s reach and the two of them stared at each other as they had done so often before, trying to read the other hastily. like they were rushing through the last fascinating page of a book. Will was the first to reach out and attempted to embrace Hannibal as he had before, but Hannibal held him back. Again, Will pushed forward, but Hannibal held him back. He waited.

Then, without warning, Hannibal grabbed at the bottom of Will’s shirt, pulling it roughly over his head and throwing it carelessly to the side. He swept Will into his arms in a crushing embrace, while Will’s arms wrapped tightly around the other man’s waist waist. They breathed hard and fast on each other’s lips, searching the other’s eyes for an answer to a question they’d forgotten. It didn’t matter because they both found what they were looking for somehow and their mouths met, wet and fervent.

Just as when their skin first met, there was fire shooting through both of them as if they were constituted entirely of dry wood and a single spark had ignited between them, alighting them both in roaring flames and sulphurous smoke that made their eyes sting and their lungs choke. It was all encompassing, taking away their breath and their sight. Will didn’t feel the dizzy sensation that Hannibal’s touch typically produced within their touch hypnosis sessions. No, that was to calm him down, whereas this awakened every single cell in his body with a single, startling shock.

Shyly at first, Will’s tongue found Hannibal’s, then in more confidence he opened his mouth further and pressed forward, revelling in the dark heat. Hannibal’s hands clutched at him like Will was his anchor this time. They roamed up and down his back along his neck and into his hair, pulling fiercely to produce a hot gasp from Will. Hannibal smiled proudly into the kiss at the sound, then pulled tighter until he felt Will’s body mindlessly thrust into his, horny and desperate to be entered, filled and ruthlessly fucked. Will was semi-hard and felt his cock being pressed between their bodies, becoming accustomed to the heat between them.

Hannibal’s hands moved back down over Will’s ass, grabbing hard enough at his firm buttocks to leave bruises, before moving down to his thighs. With his hands in place, Hannibal then pulled away and grinned at Will as he recovered enough to grin back, before Hannibal wrapped his arms around the top of Will’s legs and lifted him with ease. Will reacted with a surprised sound before wrapping his legs around Hannibal’s hips and stringing his arms over his shoulders. The older man took the full weight and their lips connected again as he carried him blindly back to the bed, where he lay him gently down on the mattress and placed his elbows either side of his head, pinning him in place. It felt like a display of dominance to Will, like he was being told that there was no way in Hell that he was leaving the bed. Will didn’t mind. On the contrary, when he was fucked, he wanted to be _fucked_. Something told him that a ferocious lion lay dormant behind Hannibal’s calm and collected exterior, pacing behind its bars and longing to be set free, to bury its teeth in new flesh.

God, Will just wanted to be screwed senseless, until his toes curled and sweat dripped from every pore. More so, he wanted Hannibal to do it, to lose control and bare his teeth and growl and grasp at his skin with purpose and intent. He wanted to make Hannibal cum hard, inside him. Just thinking about it made him stiffen and he could feel the head of his dick nudging gently at Hannibal’s thigh, while Hannibal’s own raging hard-on pressed against his hip. He had a deep need for friction, to arch his body into Hannibal’s and have Hannibal grind down on him.

Will jerked his hips up daringly as he bit down on his lip and heard Hannibal emit a small groan that made his heart expand. Wanting to hear it again, he untangled one of his arms and grabbed Hannibal’s ass before folding his legs tightly around Hannibal’s thighs and moving his hips yet again, watching a fire burn in Hannibal’s eyes as he did so, his bottom lip parting to let out that strained groan of pure _want_. All that want was for him, Will seemed to finally realise in that specific moment. He remembered sitting in Hannibal’s office and desiring to make love with a carnal passion once again. His wish was about to be granted.

In a swift movement, Hannibal sat upright, straddling Will’s lithe body and staring down at him hungrily while Will smiled back up at him with a playful grin. His chest was heaving as his heart pumped hot adrenaline throughout his body. Just as he tried to reach out and grab Hannibal, pull him back in for a deep kiss, he was stopped.

“Are you sure this is what you want, Will?” Hannibal’s voice was husky, thick with barely controlled lust.

Will nodded impatiently. He took the moment to appreciate Hannibal’s physique as it towered over him, the compact muscle and smooth skin of his chest, the burly masculinity of his toned arms, and _that face_. Will had always known he’d never forget that face from the very first time he laid eyes on it, but he realised that first glance of Hannibal’s face may have been eclipsed by his face at that very moment. Shadows cast by the lamp to Will’s right, half of Hannibal’s face was obscured by darkness, but his eyes shone through, glistening with desire, trained firmly on Will’s own face, then Hannibal’s lip twitched up in a smile and once again, Will saw the darkness burn behind his irises and his heart leapt when he realised he was the reason for that burning.

He felt Hannibal’s hands clutching at his hips while his head dipped over his chest and started kissing down from his collar bone to his nipple and his tongue darted out to flick it before he bit down lightly. Will gasped, but the sound descended into a moan as Hannibal’s teeth pulled at the skin and wet it with his tongue, while one of his hands slipped between them to cup Will’s hard cock, now stretching desperately at the fabric of his briefs.

Just as in their therapy sessions, every touch of Hannibal’s skin against his own was beyond mere human contact or sexual desire. There was electricity and passion running between them like impulses jumping between synapses and firing up to their brains, clouding their minds with want and nothing else.

When Hannibal’s hand pulled back the elastic of his underwear, while his mouth was still pre-occupied with bruising his nipples, and slid his hand down to lightly grip his hard-on, Will lost himself completely for a few moments. His back arched and his hands slid up along Hannibal’s sweaty back, following the curve of his spine, to grasp ardently at his hair and produced a small groan from Hannibal in reply, followed by a low laugh as Hannibal plucked his mouth away from Will’s perfect pectorals to peer up at him. As Will’s eyelids fluttered down and he bit his lip to hide his smile, he felt Hannibal’s grip tighten around his cock and start jerking it back and forth, causing him to throw his head back into the pillow with a wet pant, pushing his groin further into Hannibal’s hand.

Hannibal didn’t just want to undo him, he wanted to watch every second of his being undone and found pleasure in Will’s loss of control.

“I knew you’d be insatiable,” Hannibal murmured, moving further down Will’s body as his fingers withdrew from their grip around Will’s erect dick to swiftly tug the briefs off his ass in one swift movement, leaving him entirely exposed, his leaking cock standing tall and swollen and desperate for attention. “I’ve thought a lot about this,” Hannibal mused, now slowing down his hands to delicately pull the remaining fabric from Will’s legs and toss it to the floor. “I’ve thought about every sound you’ll make, every whimper and moan when I touch you…”

Will’s stomach tightened.

Hannibal moved his mouth to Will’s hip and breathed lightly across the skin as he followed the arc of his hipbone down to his erect dick. Will felt every single breath like a flame licking across his skin and shuddered underneath it. Rather than touch him or let him touch himself, Hannibal took hold of his hands and interlocked his fingers with Will’s, feeling the grip tighten and the nails dig in. “I’ve thought about how you’ll move beneath my touch…”

Then starting at the base, Hannibal dragged his flat tongue along the underside of Will’s erection, but kept his fingers securely intertwined in Will’s, even as the younger boy groaned and bucked his hips, trying to pull his hands free to grasp at the sheets, Hannibal’s hair, anything.

“Fuck, Hannibal,” he sighed, feeling every inch of the man’s tongue moving up his length before his warm mouth moved over the head and gently sucked at the tip. Unable to pull his hands away to ground himself by clinging to the other man, he pressed his thighs either side of Hannibal’s head tightly and tried to resist jerking his hips up suddenly. As his breathing came out in shaky breaths and he squeezed his eyes shut (though perfectly aware, that Hannibal was gazing up at him and carefully watching his every movement), Will felt Hannibal’s mouth move down slowly over his cock and start to apply pressure and suction before starting up a rhythm while Will’s fingernails dug relentlessly into the skin on Hannibal’s hands. Then again, it was much better than doing it to his own skin.

Just as Will whispered, “Shit, I’m gonna—”, Hannibal pulled back and slid his mouth off the tip sloppily, with a small lick of his tongue to follow, then sat back on his haunches. Will breathed heavily and watched, so fucking turned on, as Hannibal pulled back his hands finally to wipe away the gleaming mix of spit and pre-cum that clung to his bottom lip.

“Do you know what I think about the most?” Hannibal asked, reaching down to grab Will’s knees, spreading his legs while he sat poised on his haunches and refused to break eye contact. “I think about what your face will look like when I enter you.” Will flushed a deep crimson as he raised his knees higher to Hannibal’s bidding, ready to be fucked. “When I make you cum.” Will moaned wantonly at the words and shifted his ass down on the bed, welcoming Hannibal to fuck him.

Unwilling to refuse the invitation, Hannibal pulled down his own briefs and his bulging cock sprung free. But before he made a move, he reached over to the bedside table, grabbing a tube of lube and a condom out of it. He swiftly tore it open with his teeth and threw the wrapper to the side before rolling the condom over his hard length. Then he squirted a small amount of lube on his right hand and used the other to roughly hoist up Will’s knee and pull it over his shoulder, lifting his ass off the bed and giving Hannibal perfect access to his tight hole.

Hannibal now hovered directly above him and Will pushed through his own fervour to maintain the eye contact that Hannibal was desperate for. Will looked right through his eyes and remembered their first moment of contact, the creation of Adam, his moment of salvation. He’d known that it was important, but he would never have predicted that it would lead to this moment: fervently anticipating the moment when Hannibal Lecter would finally thrust his cock inside his ass and fuck him until he was screaming out god knows what.

First, he felt Hannibal’s slick index finger, coated in lube, pressing at his asshole. Shit, it had definitely been a while since anyone had fingered him. He recognised that this might hurt. As if he’d sensed the trepidation on Will’s face, Hannibal only continued to circle Will’s hole teasingly with his fingers but would not enter.

“Please,” Will begged breathlessly and Hannibal yielded, pressing the tip of his index finger inside, producing a string of curse words from his lover. Will was right, this would definitely hurt.

But Hannibal was careful and turned his head to place a gentle kiss on Will’s calf that was pressed against the side of his face while he trembled on the precipice between pain and pleasure.

Still, he begged again, “Please.”

He felt it, every time Hannibal touched him, and even more so as the touching became more and more intimate — that sweet release, like he was drifting outside of his body yet still excruciatingly aware of every single touch and lick and kiss that Hannibal subjected on his physical form. It felt _so good_.

Hannibal relented to Will’s demands yet again and pressed another finger inside of him, causing him to toss his head to the side and screw his eyes shut, but Hannibal wouldn’t have any of that and immediately began to withdraw his fingers until Will opened his eyes again and they shared that same look.

“I told you, I want to see your face when I enter you, Will,” Hannibal said, using his unoccupied hand to soothingly rub up and down Will’s thigh. In reward for looking at him, Hannibal’s fingers pushed inside again and gently started fucking him, preparing him for what was to come. His muscles still clenched tight around Hannibal’s fingers and their jerking movements, but he needed that friction. He ached for it.

Will moaned sadly when they withdrew, but then Hannibal wiped the remnants of the lube on his dick and pressed its head to Will’s entrance until he was keening lasciviously at the stiff cock, trying to push it inside of himself. He felt mildly pathetic, but Hannibal only watched and waited, admiring Will’s eagerness before he reached up and stroked the side of his face, muttering, “Perfect.”

Finally, Hannibal gently pushed into him and Will’s mouth opened wide as he gasped loudly, fighting the urge to shut his eyes as he slowly took all of Hannibal’s cock. When he was almost all the way to the hilt, Hannibal leant down, opening Will up further as he pushed his leg up against his stomach and met his mouth for a sloppy yet zealous kiss.

When he felt that Will was ready, Hannibal started thrusting, trying to angle himself just the right way until— _Fuck._

Will pulled away from the long kiss and let out a low moan as the tip of Hannibal’s cock met perfectly with his prostate. Hannibal let his forehead, sticky with sweat, rest against Will’s as he grinned victoriously down at him and kept aiming for that one spot that made such beautiful sounds come out of his lover.

Will continued to meet Hannibal’s thrusts with his own hips, increasingly the pressure and reaching between them to stroke at his own cock, feeling the precum leak down into the sweaty crevices of his hands. All the while they gasped and panted like animals, filling the room with the musky scent of sex as they went.

The two of them pushed themselves together repeatedly, both burning with a passionate fever and lost in erotic sensations that fell somewhere between wrath and rapture. That initial spark had fizzled and flared until the two of them were one harmoniously roaring blaze, setting the entire world on fire.

“Hannibal,” Will huffed, trying to find a grip on his back but their skin was too damp and he couldn’t find the strength to hold on properly as he came increasingly closer to his peak, “I’m almost—”

Hannibal took the opportunity to reach between them and place his hand over Will’s, his wrist moving quickly to pump his partner’s rock-hard member until he could see that the look on his face was nothing short of pure ecstasy. Will cried out and his hip bucked needily as white spurts of cum shot from his cock, feeling the pleasure exploding low in his guts and erupting through his entire body.

Will’s voice was lost to incoherent mumblings with Hannibal’s name somewhere in there, which was the final stimulation Hannibal needed to reach his own tipping point. Still buried deep inside Will, he also came hard, but made sure to keep a careful eye on Will’s face at every second, measuring his reaction as he felt Hannibal’s release inside him. First, his eyes grew wide in recognition of the sensation, then pooled with satisfaction.

Before he started to soften, Hannibal pulled out of Will and lowered his leg to collapse on top of him, smearing Will’s cum over both their chests before rolling off onto the other side of the bed, panting heavily.

Will was the first to start chuckling before Hannibal joined in, all the endorphins and sweet pleasure from their orgasms still coursing through their systems and filling them both with joy.

“That was fun,” Will remarked, before feeling Hannibal’s hand reaching around his own to give it a gentle squeeze. He took that as a sign that Hannibal was too worn out to speak just yet and instead they both lay there, staring up at the ceiling and ignoring all other trials and tribulations of their lives at that moment. All that mattered was the two of them.

But Will felt a heaviness on his finger. Molly’s wedding ring. After a while of feeling its metal sear into him, he couldn’t help but draw his hand up to his face to study the reminder of his infidelity. Hannibal noticed morosely, unwilling to break their spell.

“I took you in, in the hopes that I could heal you enough to have you return to your wife,” Hannibal sighed, before rolling onto his side and giving Will a long, adoring look. “Unless… you would like to stay here with me instead?”

It was the unspoken question that he’d asked earlier on when he’d offered Will the phone to call Molly. He was undecided then, and he was still undecided now. Will shook his head.

“I can’t leave her.”

“Can’t you?”

Will considered Hannibal’s words. It was true that the thought of never returning to her made him ache, but the thought of leaving Hannibal made him practically distraught. He’d spent 5 years with her and had believed that he would spend the rest of his life with her, but he couldn’t imagine a time now when he would be able to look at her without seeing the misery he’d inflicted on her. He couldn’t help but picture her laid out on their bed in the shape of an angel, but slashed all over with deep cuts while his trembling hand clutched the bloody knife.

Hannibal rolled on top of him, stealing him from his sick fantasy as their naked bodies pressed together again and _god_ it still felt amazing just to have their skin touch. He grabbed Will’s hand in his, the other moving up to the top of his neck.

“You made me love you, Will. Now I have you, I can’t let go.”

Will said nothing, but submitted to Hannibal nonetheless by turning his chin up to expose his neck and allowing Hannibal to plant kisses along the exposed skin. He felt himself becoming aroused yet again and threw his arms ardently around Hannibal, his nails digging into the skin on his back and pulling roughly down to give him scars like his own.

They melded together, blurring at the edges and conjoining in a hot mix of sweat and flesh.

After they made love a second time, Hannibal quickly fell asleep with Will’s head resting against his chest and measuring the steady, hypnotic rise and fall of his breathing. But something still weighed on his mind and it wasn’t Molly any more. There was some niggling doubt about the entire situation that Will couldn’t quite place his finger on. So rather than toss and turn all night, he extracted himself from under Hannibal’s arm and scurried into the adjacent bathroom, still stark naked.

He flicked on the light by the mirror and saw his face illuminated in the reflection when he began to speak. But it wasn’t himself that he was speaking to.

“Why do you like him?”

Nothing.

“I’m trying to talk to you. I _want_ to talk to you. Why did you leave?”

No answer.

Will slowly sank to the floor and gathered his knees against his chest.

Why did he suddenly feel so alone? It was the exact same emptiness he’d felt the first time it left, like a gaping wound in his chest that needed to be filled. At the time, he only had the now-infatuated young girl who he’d quickly come to see as his responsibility. He needed to fill that void again. Luckily, he knew exactly how to fill it this time.

Will slipped back into the bedroom and slid under the cool covers, though they still ran vaguely damp with their mingled sweat. Hannibal stirred, then reached out insentiently, pulling Will tightly into his arms. Will gazed at his new partner: his exquisite beauty and peaceful expression.

“You have me now,” Will whispered, half-defeated, into Hannibal’s neck, then strung his arm over his lover’s body and moulded himself back into the curve of his hip where he fit perfectly.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> WOW this was a long chapter and boy did it take me a while, too. First a lot of inner dialogue from Will and then it just descended into smut. I realised in the midst of writing it that it was in fact the first sex scene I've ever written. I mean, I sure as hell read a lot of them, but actually thinking back to my formative years writing fic (when I was a baby who hadn't even seen a penis let alone touched one) I never reached the climax (so to say) of the story sex-wise.
> 
> So be gentle with me ;)
> 
> This coooould be classified as dubcon, given the nature of their pre-existing relationship, but I was careful when writing it to distinguish between Will's actions that were the result of Hannibal's control over him and the actions that were his own. Hannibal may have manipulated the situation, but he wouldn't want Will under any false pretences.
> 
> In case you're wondering why Hannibal is so confident that the Voice is gone, remember their little chat? Yeah, they talked and came to something of an arrangement...
> 
> No, those handcuffs really aren't kinky. Yes, they are used to chain up his victims while he slowly flays their skin and carves off the fatty meat to serve up to Will under the title "kobe beef"...


	13. Kill To Eat

The biting cold made ghosts of their words as Will and Hannibal trenched through the snow in their heavy boots with the dogs bounding around them, delighting in the wintry nirvana. They talked about the past. Their mouths formed spirits. They each remembered a life before the other.

Will had missed Wolf Trap, even under its thick layer of white, but he found himself distracted from a reminiscent reverie by his conversation with Hannibal. There was a near-obsessive tone to his growing love for Hannibal, but he felt it was legitimised so long as it was reciprocated. And it was reciprocated. He’d never much bought in to the passionate Shakespearean romance, of lovers laying down their lives for each other, constantly battling the inner turmoil of their passion. But with Hannibal… With Hannibal it was as if the songs he’d been singing his whole life finally had a person to be about. He was the moon, the stars, a white blizzard and a tumultuous storm all at once.

Hannibal never showed the same sort of dependence on him. He’d never called him up crying in the dead of night. But he had always picked up Will’s call. That meant something. He also looked at Will in this very specific way — when they lay together after sex with their spent dicks limp across their bellies and grinned at each other, Hannibal looked at him as if he was looking into a deep, deep ocean and seeing all the way to the bottom. He looked like he could just dive in and slowly sink down, leagues and leagues of deep blue, until he settled on the ocean floor.

Did Will ever look at Hannibal like that? Did Hannibal notice? If he did, Will imagined that he was probably looking at Hannibal with that very look of smitten awe that morning, as they trod across the fresh snow on their way to his old boat workshop by the river.

It must have been nearly 6 months since he’d packed up and left his old home. But he was glad to say that he no longer thought of it as a home. It was in the past and Will spoke of it as a memory as they approached.

“I saved up so much money to buy it. I was just a kid fresh out of Louisiana and I had no idea how much these things cost. But I was repairing car engines in Washington city and I wanted out of there as soon as I could.”

“Do you still hate the city?”

“It wasn’t so much the city itself as my living arrangements. I slept with 4 other people in a 2 bedroom apartment. I was on the sofa and sometimes we had guests, in which case I shared the sofa.” Hannibal laughed restrainedly and Will lightly nudged him with his shoulder. “It’s really not funny.”

“You really need to learn to assert yourself, Will,” Hannibal chuckled, shaking his head, though his words were serious.

“I know. I’ve always had trouble with that.” Will sighed distantly, trying not to get hung up on all of the tribulations that he’d suffered by not being able to stand up for himself. He tried even harder, however, not to think about those few times when he had…

“I’ll help you learn,” Hannibal said resolutely and Will looked at him thankfully.

They eventually reached the derelict wooden shack where Will’s workshop used to be. He’d sold off anything of value before he’d left and abandoned the remainders to scavengers and scrap metal heaps. Unfortunately, he’d misplaced the key, probably lost somewhere at Molly’s place, which he hadn’t been near in months. His dogs recognised the old place, bare as it was, and immediately ran up to the door expectantly, waiting to be let inside.

“Sorry, guys,” Will said to them despondently as they sat in front of the glorified shed and stared up at him with pleading eyes, “this is just a passing visit.” Will yearned to break in the door, sit in his old abode where he used to spend hours just tweaking and welding and exulting in the silent nothingness that went through his mind. It was a time before the Voice returned, when he was confident in his own human decency if nothing else. But the memory of its presence had still been prevalent enough for him to respect and appreciate the peace.

Hannibal must have noticed the melancholy in his voice as he took the opportunity to lightly squeeze his arm. He wasn’t much of a hand-holding man, Will was aware, but neither was he so it was the equivalent of tangling their fingers together in their own minds. Mentally linked, they descended further through the thick snow to a slow-moving stream. Crystal rivulets of ice were forming along the bank and getting swept up in the current and slipping down to the faster-moving water.

“This is leads to the Potomac river, which passes through Washington and down into the Chesapeake Bay,” Will informed Hannibal as they started walking alongside it, following the flow of water East, as if they were planning to keep going until they reached the Atlantic. “Maryland is on just the other side. I think when I left Washington, I was just fighting my way upstream. I knew that this was where I meant to be when I came out here to fish one time and it was like the world made sense again. I remembered my childhood dream of repairing boats and living in solitude and realised I could make it come true.” Will’s own words evoked the days making trips alongside the bayou to the old boatshed, before the place had been tainted for him. There was a time when he’d considered that to be his home, before this.

“Did you ever go fishing once you moved to Baltimore?” Hannibal asked, carefully observing Will’s emotions as they passed across his face. Will shook his head. “It may have helped.”

“No, it would have just reminded me too much of being here. It would have been too hard to resist coming back. So many of my memories of living in Virginia came from fishing. I even made my own lures. I was always up to my knees in the cold water, casting my line as I waded into the deep of the stream…” Will recalled absentmindedly.

“Did you always eat the fish?”

“Always.”

Hannibal paused before asking, “You never felt guilty about taking its life so intimately, then consuming it?” Will tilted his head and sent Hannibal a questioning look.

“Are you trying to convert me to vegetarianism?” Will chuckled.

“Only trying to understand your motivations,” Hannibal replied, his tone revealing nothing and his face totally straight. Will shrugged.

“Well, I suppose that although the fishing itself is the fun part, it seems wasteful not to eat the fish after it’s caught. Throwing it back almost detracts from the pleasure of catching it in the first place.” Will realised the truth in his words as he spoke them, given that the answer had been entirely spontaneous and he’d never thought too long or too hard on _why_. He always fished, he always ate the fish. But looking introspectively at his actions, he saw that he did have genuine motivations behind them.

“The hunt is only the start of a series of events which must be completed,” Hannibal analysed thoughtfully. “The fish must have an end to its story, just as you must make an end to your fishing trip.”

“I suppose it’s almost cathartic,” Will pondered languorously.

Hannibal stopped, grabbing Will’s hand and forcing him to come to a halt. Will turned to face him and Hannibal reached up to caress his face affectionately, while his cold fingers pushed underneath Will’s collar to press against his neck, making him shiver. “Kill to eat,” he murmured, his eyes fixed on Will’s lips.

“Kill to eat,” Will repeated back to him before leaning in to press a short kiss against Hannibal’s lips. But something had got Hannibal going and he adeptly deepened the kiss, gripping the other side of Will’s face to pull him even closer. Will flinched and pulled back, smiling. “Your hands are really cold,” he complained.

Hannibal gave him a look that Will usually only saw in the bedroom (and sometimes in the shower, once in the kitchen), although it wasn’t a solely sexual gaze. It was just a look of pure, unadulterated love that flustered Will every time he caught it. But he didn’t become so embarrassed because he felt unworthy any more, as he had previously. Never in his life had he felt so strong as when he was with Hannibal.

Hannibal reached out to touch him again, but Will ducked away with a sly grin.

“No, your hands are too cold.”

“Will. Kiss me.” Hannibal’s voice was low and commanding, but Will only shook his head, standing out of reach.

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I’m trying to assert myself, Dr Lecter.” The professional title only came out when Will was feeling particularly playful, but Hannibal always appeared to appreciate it, even though their professional relationship had ceased. Will smirked furtively at him.

“You seem happy here, Will. I wish I could have known you before now, when you lived here.”

“Don’t. You came along at just the right time.”

The longer Will spent living in strangely blissful domesticity with Hannibal, the more he settled on the permanence of their relationship. No longer was it about him getting better or dealing with his past. It was just about him and Hannibal sharing a life together. It was a happy ending that appeared from seemingly nowhere and all of a sudden, but fit perfectly. Well, almost perfectly. Something still itched at the back of Will’s mind. It was all too easy. Maybe the universe somehow owed him after all that he’d been put through, but why break the habit of a lifetime?

“Why do you like him?” Will would continue to ask himself, staring fiercely into the mirror in their bathroom and whispering quietly to make sure Hannibal didn’t hear him and get suspicious. But he never got an answer. Nevertheless, Will couldn’t shake off the feeling that the Voice was still lingering somewhere in the recesses of his mind and watching everything…

“Come on,” Will announced suddenly, turning around and whistling for the dogs to follow. “Let’s get back to the car.”

~

Will pushed the blade of the knife into the flesh and gently sawed through the pliant meat with the sharp edge. His fingers rested on top of the cut of flank and he felt the fleshy realness of it as the blood stained his fingertips. He hadn’t been able to touch knives for a while after he’d moved in with Hannibal, always horribly reminded of his hand jerking and the tip of the blade piercing Molly’s cheek, the blood dripping down the silvery edge. Slowly, he’d become accustomed to sharp objects all over again because having to leave the room at the sight of a steak knife or a razor blade made him feel like a recovering mental patient — and to what extent that label was accurate made him feel vastly uncomfortable.

“Thinner slices,” Hannibal commanded from next to him, watching Will’s hands work the meat, pulling strips of it away as he struggled to cut it in the artful fashion he always saw Hannibal doing it.

“Sorry,” Will muttered and tried to move the blade closer out, but only succeeded in producing a pathetically small slice of beef that was unworthy of Hannibal’s table. He cursed and flicked it to the side. “I told you I was lousy at cooking.”

“You only need practice, Will. One day, you’re going to be far more talented with a blade.” Hannibal watched Will labour for a few seconds before coming up behind him and grabbing the kitchen knife from his fingers. Peering over his shoulder, he took over the work, their bodies pressed compactly together as Will was sandwiched tightly between Hannibal and the counter.

“You need to slice it diagonally, against the grain, to get the finer cuts,” Hannibal explained as his expert hands effortlessly sliced away.

Will groaned and leaned his head back against Hannibal’s shoulder. “Can’t you do it? I’m useless.”

“No, you’re not. I don’t expect you to become an expert overnight.” Hannibal forced the knife back into Will’s hand. “Now you try.”

Hannibal stepped back and Will immediately missed the warmth of his body. Once again, he took up the knife and began slicing through the flesh, when his hand slipped suddenly, nicking one of his fingers with the tip of the blade.

“Fuck,” Will hissed, hastily pulling back his hand before the blood started to well and drip over the food. Hannibal was quick to grab his hand and lead him to the sink, where he turned on the water and rinsed Will’s wound.

“Not to worry,” Hannibal assured him, still clasping his finger. “I’ll finish it up and put it in the marinade.”

“I don’t think I’ll qualify as your sous-chef just yet,” Will sighed, shaking the water from his hands and removing his apron as Hannibal returned to the chopping board. He watched with admiration as Hannibal dropped the slices of steak into a dish filled with a mixture of soy sauce, red wine vinegar, lemon juice and various herbs and spices, gently swirling and massaging the meat in the marinade. “Honestly, I still don’t really trust myself with knives.”

Will then remembered lashing out at Hannibal, the small splatter of crimson, as he gazed at the tiny cut on his finger.

“But you’re healthy now,” Hannibal said, turning to look at him with a raised eyebrow.

“That doesn’t mean I’m not traumatised,” Will replied bitterly. “I still remember everything and it’s all so detailed. I keep thinking that it’s just… biding its time until it returns.”

“Why would that be? Do you feel unsafe in this environment?” Hannibal was walking the tightrope that would sometimes be strung up in their relationship, balancing between therapist and concerned partner.

“Because I don’t understand why it’s not there anymore. I didn’t win, but it’s just gone. If I didn’t defeat it, why would it leave?”

“You’ve come to interpret the battle between yourself and the Voice as the fight between good and evil. Maybe it’s time for a new perspective?” Hannibal picked up the dish to take it to the fridge, perhaps thinking this would be an easier conversation if he tried to divert the psychiatric tone.

“Such as?”

“I know you claimed that it was coincidental, the Voice leaving when you found your first love—”

“It wasn’t love.”

“Maybe not a romantic love in the end, but love nonetheless.” Hannibal opened the fridge and placed the meat inside. “Someone you loved who loved you back; something you never experienced before, but deeply yearned for. When you finally found it…” Hannibal’s voice trailed off as he kept his face inside the fridge and listened for Will’s reply.

“No. No, that’s all wrong. I was never unhappy with Molly. I _did_ love her.”

Hannibal then walked back over to the sink where Will was standing, leaning in closely to clasp his hand, his eyes interrogating him as he asked, “But perhaps you were looking for something else? Someone who could take on a more intimate knowledge of your… true self.”

How could Will refute that to Hannibal’s face? He was practically flat-out declaring his unconditional love for him and asking Will to accept it.

“You really do think the Voice is just my subconscious, don’t you?” It was impossible to hide the feeling of betrayal that dripped from every word and he pulled his hand away.

“I believe there’s a reason that you never heard the Voice when you were with me, Will. I believe there’s a reason that you no longer hear it at all.”

“Maybe it just really likes you and it approves of your influence on me,” Will joked, trying to bring a swift finish to the discussion. But that thought lingered, perhaps longer than was comfortable.

~

It was strange waiting outside Hannibal’s office but not for an appointment. Will was surprised to find the building less tainted by his mental instability than he had expected, although he’d practically had a full-on breakdown the last time he’d treaded its halls. There was a surreal element to being there, breathing in its smell and suffocatingly therapeutic environment, without feeling the need to be medically stabilised. He didn’t feel the dread of the ensuing brain-picking, nor the fraught anxiety of awaiting Hannibal’s presence. Instead, he was only excited to surprise Hannibal, turning up unexpectedly with a bottle of red wine and amorous rendezvous in mind.

It was by no means typical of Will to arrange romantic engagements on a whim, but he’d never felt so excruciatingly in love before either. He felt as if Hannibal was crucial to his very existence, perhaps lingering from their intensely dependent psychiatrist-patient relationship, even though Hannibal had attempted to immediately cease it, telling him that it was unethical. Nevertheless, these things were difficult to separate so clearly and easily. Maybe Will wasn’t helping that by turning up at Hannibal’s place of work with every intention of making love to him. His mind raced through the possibilities: on the chair, the desk, the couch… Against the ladder? Will felt his cock twitch, picturing Hannibal mounting him vertically as he clung to the wooden rungs of the ladder…

Then Will turned as he heard the door open and Hannibal murmuring to a patient as he exited the office. Any amount of jealousy that he used to harbour for the man and all Hannibal’s other patients was extinct; Will was special now, more important than any of them. He beamed at Hannibal and held up the bottle of wine as Hannibal laid eyes on him, barely disguising the pleasant surprise on his face.

“I’ll see you next week, Franklyn,” Hannibal said, but his eyes didn’t leave Will’s and the other man seemed to excuse himself awkwardly.

Will made his way into the office and placed the bottle on Hannibal’s desk. “What’s the occasion?” Hannibal asked, picking up the bottle to study the label, no doubt scrutinising the year and the make and the origin with his keen eye and impeccable taste. Will rolled his eyes.

“No occasion in particular. And don’t worry,” Will said, taking the bottle back. “I didn’t go rummaging around your wine cellar. I bought it myself.” Hannibal had seemed fairly anxious about Will invading his wine collection the last time he’d suggested choosing a bottle for dinner. Thankfully, he didn’t need to worry about splashing out around $100 on wine as he was essentially a kept man. Not that Molly wasn’t also the breadwinner during their time together, but the difference in financial comfort was certainly noticeable to Will. He set the bottle back down on the desk and cast a flirtatious look at Hannibal.

They were swiftly on top of each other as Hannibal pulled Will towards him and caught his lips in a passionate kiss. Will’s hands flew to Hannibal’s hair, getting enjoyment from tussling the perfectly styled locks as he combed through them and sighed happily into Hannibal’s mouth. Immediately, Will felt Hannibal’s hands reaching for his belt buckle already aching to be inside him, but Will forced himself to draw away. Hannibal looked at him in confusion.

“Sorry, but I paid for this wine and we’re going to drink it,” Will said defiantly. Hannibal breathed deeply through his nostrils and pulled back.

“I’ll go find a couple of glasses.”

“I’ll still be here when you get back,” Will teased, unbuttoning his shirt and pulling it off his shoulders. He then reached down to finish unbuckling his belt, when Hannibal’s hand stopped him.

“I can take care of that when I return.” With that, he gave Will a quick, chaste kiss and hurried off to track down the wine glasses.

Will couldn’t help but smile to himself. He was glowing. He reclined against the desk as he waited, but jumped up when he heard a buzzing sound. It was a vibration. Then there it was again, coming from inside the desk itself. Curiosity got the better of Will. Had Hannibal left his phone in there? What if Hannibal had misplaced it and was trying to find it by calling?

Inquisitively, Will walked round to the other side of the desk and opened a couple of draws, mainly finding pages and pages of drawings, but he only glanced at them briefly. He was already well aware of Hannibal’s talent with a pencil and paper, having woken up multiple times to find his naked body being artfully sketched. He usually shied away, but sometimes he’d feign sleep a little longer. There were files, notebooks — no doubt notes on patients, so he decided it was best to avoid looking at them. He briefly wondered if Hannibal kept a file for him, although he’d never written any notes during their sessions. He probably would still have had to write them up afterwards. But the thought left his mind suddenly when he found the phone. It was buried underneath a pile of papers and it didn’t look like his normal phone.

Will’s heart sank. His mind started to jump to all kinds of convoluted conclusions about why it was there, but the question still remained: why would Hannibal keep as econd phone in his desk buried under a pile of papers?

The phone buzzed in his hand and the screen lit up. His heart sank ever further when he read the message that appeared. Although he didn’t exactly understand what he was looking at, he knew at the back of his mind what it meant.

_Molly: ‘Will, I signed and sent the divorce papers to the address you gave me.’_

Will suddenly felt a panic rise in his chest, looking to the door to Hannibal’s office and then back to the phone. This was his last chance to get answers. Hurriedly, he tapped on the message and it opened up a long series of texts back and forth, dating back from weeks and weeks ago. There were only a handful of brief exchanges but the context was clear: Hannibal had been texting Molly, pretending to be him…

_Why?_

Will felt sick.

He read the messages that clearly showed Hannibal was subtly orchestrating his and Molly’s divorce behind his back using what appeared to be a duplicate of his phone: arranging to get the papers and take the dogs and move out his stuff, all in his name.

The final blow came when he reached the text that was sent sent the morning after he had slept with Hannibal for the first time. As he’d given himself over to Hannibal completely, placed his full trust in the man he loved and believed could never hurt him, Hannibal had gone behind his back to break up his relationship.

_‘It’s over’_ , he had texted her.

Will dropped the phone back in the desk and slammed the drawer shut, totally speechless. All of a sudden, his entire relationship with Hannibal was cast in a different light. Perhaps he was less of the noble Cyrano, sacrificing his own happiness for that of the man he loved, and more like a cunning fox, destroying Will’s marriage from the inside out.

Will’s nausea turned to thick, burning rage. He wanted to march up to Hannibal with the phone in his hand, throw it in his face, scream at him, demand answers. Then, it slowly melted into heartbreak. He loved him and he’d betrayed him, without Will having the slightest idea what was going on. As Hannibal took it upon himself to ensure that Will’s relationship with Molly was officially over, he’d been blissfully falling more and more in love with him. He felt like a lovesick fool. So he forced himself to ask: what else didn’t he know?

More disturbingly and in the light of this revelation, Will found himself realising there might be a simpler answer as to why the Voice had disappeared…

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I'm aware that was a fairly abrupt ending, given that there's only one more chapter, but all will come to light...
> 
> 2 things in this chapter that have a very vague basis in reality are:
> 
> 1) Phone cloning. I have a very basic knowledge of this. I know it can be done. I know it's illegal. That's pretty much it, but can we suspend our disbelief for a second and assume that the possibilities are endless...
> 
> 2) Preparing meat. I have never cooked meat in my life. I literally just googled "how to prepare steak" and now my search history looks very suspicious given that I am a vegan... (Also, that meat was definitely not from a cow, just in case you were wondering.)
> 
> Forgive me for my trespasses!
> 
> Actually, my vegan tendencies came out as I was writing about Will fishing. Save the fish! Eat people instead!


	14. A Good Man

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for mentions of child abuse.

_Will was sitting in an armchair in the darkness. He was naked. Bizarrely, he felt less like a physical being and more like a swirling mass of limbs and thoughts and feelings, disassociated from his corpse. Nevertheless, he could feel Hannibal’s lips hot against his ear. They were unmistakeably Hannibal’s lips. Will could identify them based solely on the pattern of breathing and the soft touch of flesh tingling against his skin._

_“Give him to me and I’ll give him to you,” Hannibal whispered and Will felt his lips twist up in a smirk._

_“Deal,” Will replied, unaware of himself. Hannibal’s hand crept up around his face while his lips gently pressed against Will’s ear in a gentle kiss. The hand moved smoothly down his face to his chin, turning it so that Will’s lips could be kissed by Hannibal’s. Will eased into the kiss, suddenly in control of his body again and when he leaned back, they fell onto their bed. Now Hannibal was naked too, pressed into his side and messily kissing him._

_Gently, Hannibal put a hand on Will’s shoulder and moved his body over so that he was lying on his side and Will felt Hannibal’s hard cock between his ass cheeks. Placing his hand lightly on Will’s hip, Hannibal slipped inside him with a gentle thrust that made Will cry out softly. Hannibal’s hips moved slowly, but Will felt every inch inside him and craned his neck for Hannibal to kiss him once more, to muffle his quiet cries._

_Tracing his hand up Will’s hip and across his torso, Hannibal came to cup his face almost possessively as he continued to thrust rhythmically. As mouth joined with Hannibal’s once again, Will felt a sizzling warmth spread from there throughout his body. He was suddenly so hot, as if he’d stepped into a sauna or his skin had been set on fire. The heat consumed him as Hannibal pushed into him again and again, the movements getting harder and faster and rougher, until he grabbed Will’s arm and twisted it behind his back before turning him swiftly over and moving on top of him as Will moaned deeply into the pillow. Like a thick smoke, Hannibal smothered him until he was completely consumed._

Will awoke with a gasp. The sheets were damp with sweat. It was still dark outside.

As it happened, Will hadn’t lived out any of his sexual fantasies in Hannibal’s office that night. Instead, he’d downed almost the entire bottle of wine on an empty stomach and ended up getting so inebriated that Hannibal had to take him home early and put him to bed, where he proceeded to have strange dreams, half blurred memories and half twisted nightmares. Just as when he had rescued Will that night from his apartment and they had become lovers a mere day later, Hannibal had carried him from the car to his bed. Pressed tightly against his partner’s chest, Will felt less comforted and more trapped. Trapped by Hannibal and trapped by himself.

Will glanced over at the space next to him and saw it was void of Hannibal’s body. A mixture of relief and yearning filled him spontaneously, forcing him to question himself yet again. But the most prominent question had to be, “Why?” Will rolled onto his back to stare deeply at the endless white of the ceiling and simply run that singular question through his head again and again.

His relationship with Molly was doomed at that point and they both knew it. Will would have eventually got around to filing for a divorce, but for the time being had been perfectly content to fall into life with Hannibal. In his own mind, there had been no lingering shadow of his previous relationship. He’d put the wedding ring away in a drawer and didn’t think about it. Every so often, he might have considered getting in contact with Molly, but had decided the better of it. If anything, she needed space from him. But he needed space from her too and had filled that space quite well with Hannibal, so he had no reason to be insecure or hasty.

So why Hannibal would take it upon himself to put the final nail in Will’s marriage divided him into two distinct trains of thought. The first was the optimistic one: Hannibal hadn’t wanted Will to experience the pain of having to live up to his failed marriage, so had used an unconventional method to spare him the trouble. But that neglected the obvious fact that there was premeditation involved — the phone Will had found was a duplicate of his.

When Will had been living in Washington, a girl with curly red hair called Freddie had passed through his apartment. She was an aspiring journalist who wrote articles about cancer for a living, but had once taken it upon herself to explain to a dead-eyed Will her grander ambitions involving investigative journalism. One such hobby she’d picked up was phone hacking and he had somehow managed to remember for all those years her mention of duplicating a SIM card in order to listen and make calls as well as receive and send texts all from another number. She’d even said that it was possible to listen to voicemails and alter call logs. So prior to the night they first slept together, Hannibal would have had to have got a hold of his phone and duplicated the SIM card, which led Will to a much more sinister but nevertheless far more convincing conclusion: Hannibal had been planning something all along. He hadn’t just put the final nail in the coffin, he’d put in every single one, hammered them down and paid for the funeral to boot.

Will forced himself to think back on that painful time when his mind had been falling into total disarray and specifically recall Hannibal’s treatment: the sleeping pills, the touch therapy, the late night calls and coping mechanisms… How much of it was real? And, yet again, why? Because Will had discovered that the most alarming thought that had passed through his head was what if sleeping with him wasn’t some end goal, but just another piece of the puzzle on his way to achieving what he wanted? But then what did he want?

Will thought back to his dream.

_“Give him to me and I’ll give him to you.”_

What did it mean?

Will rolled out of bed, his head spinning. He didn’t feel safe with Hannibal any more. He needed to get out. On his tip-toes, Will scampered over to the wardrobe and pulled out a few articles of clothing and quickly slipped them on. Before he did up his shirt, he paused and looked down at his bare chest. It would be cold, wouldn’t it? Hurriedly, he pulled open one of the drawers with Hannibal’s t-shirts and pulled it over his head before buttoning up his own shirt over it. For the warmth, he told himself, breathing in the scent that lingered all over it.

When he was dressed, Will crept out onto the landing with his shoes in his hand, listening for the sound of Hannibal cooking downstairs. That was nothing new. Hannibal would often work late into the night to prepare his food the rest of the week, while Will waited upstairs for him, reading a book while reclining on the bed. Hannibal might return to the bed after midnight and Will would eagerly put down the book and prepare to be taken up in Hannibal’s arms instead. But not tonight, Will thought to himself.

Every stair was a possible alarm bell. He feared a sudden groaning creak with every step, but as he neared the bottom and stuck his head out round the corner, he saw the front door and his heart lifted. Pricking his ears to hear Hannibal still working in the kitchen, he decided to take the plunge and sprinted to the front door, his feet hammering against the floor as he went, but he didn’t care. He only needed to escape. He finally reached his goal and pulled on the handle. Then he pulled on it again. Then again.

“It’s locked.”

Will whipped round, dropping his shoes and pressing his body up against the door in a sudden rush of fear, perhaps thinking that he might just be able to fall through it if he pushed hard enough. Hannibal approached from the other end of the hall, carrying a large kitchen knife in one hand and slowly walking towards Will, his long shadow stretching before him and his face cast in darkness.

“I can see you’re feeling fairly distressed, Will. Perhaps you’d like to sit down and we can converse as adults,” Hannibal said in a level tone, as if he was suggesting that they go out for dinner that night or take the dogs for an evening stroll. Will felt his body begin to tremble and he pushed himself further along the wall, into a corner where he cowered nervously.

“Stay away from me, Hannibal,” Will warned, his voice strong, although his body language proved his courage to be severely lacking.

“The Voice still has a hold on you,” Hannibal said calmly, his free hand outstretched as he gradually came closer and closer. “You’re imagining things. You’re over-reacting.”

“Don’t try it, Hannibal,” Will hissed with conviction, “I know what you’re doing.” Hannibal’s face hardened slightly.

“I only want to help you, Will. Help you to discover what’s inside yourself.”

Will started to panic as Hannibal drew nearer. Adrenaline began building up inside his veins and his heart pumped faster, preparing for him to run… only there was nowhere for him to run to. But he still tried. He pushed himself way from the wall, flinging himself back at Hannibal and pushing past him with all his force. The back door was probably locked, but there were always the sliding glass doors in the dining room. Even if they were locked, he would only need to hurl a chair and—

Hannibal’s hand caught his wrist, the grip far tighter than any he’d ever used on Will before and he cried out in pain as he was stopped in his tracks, briefly worried that it may have dislocated some of the bones in his arm from how much it hurt. But there was no time to dwell on it as he started struggling, trying to pull away. Almost effortlessly, Hannibal yanked him forcefully back into his reach as he dropped the knife and his other hand came up to grab aggressively at the back of Will’s neck. With Will firmly in his grasp, Hannibal violently pulled the younger man’s writhing body back to his.

In spite of it all, Hannibal still had a hold over him. The touch therapy was sickeningly ingrained into him. Hannibal touched, he submitted. It once seemed like such a sweet relief, but now it came as a dreaded blow.

“Relax,” Hannibal commanded and Will felt the tension immediately ease from his body as he slumped against Hannibal’s chest. He shivered, horrified, against the other man’s body as a large hand started to comb through his hair. Will whimpered in fear. “Now I think you need to get some rest. We’re going on a long journey.”

With that, there was a sharp pain in his arm and Will was conscious for long enough to see a needle buried in the crook of his elbow, before he felt himself floating. Rapidly his vision dulled, his limbs slackened and everything went black.

~

 

When Will came to, he was in a moving car, slumped against the passenger window. It was the bright light of mid-morning and he blearily watched the dense shrubbery at the side of the road shoot past like smudged oil pastels on a canvas. He gazed longingly at the great expanse of the open road ahead of him before looking over to his captor.

“Where are we going?” Will croaked.

“You’ll recognise it when we get there,” Hannibal answered coolly. There was an element of annoyance to his voice, as if he was angry at Will for something. Worse than that, Will’s immediate response upon sensing the disapproval in his tone had to been to want to apologise and quell the situation. Like this was all _his_ fault.

Will shook himself out of it and decided not to engage. He had to plan his escape. Will began looking around as inconspicuously as he could but quickly realised that he wasn’t restrained at all and his eyes quickly flew to the door handle. The car was moving at about 80 mph, so the jump would be risky, but Will had to weigh up the injuries versus whatever Hannibal may have in mind for him…

“I’m not keeping you as a hostage, Will,” Hannibal said, evidently anticipating the thoughts that were going through his mind at that moment with painful accuracy. “Nor do I intend for you to come to any harm. But I know you found out about the phone and I think an explanation is in order.”

“You could have explained it to me back at the house,” Will growled resentfully and folded his arms over his chest. Regardless of what Hannibal said, he was still keeping a high-speed leap from the car as a viable option in the back of his mind.

“I could have. But I thought bringing you to where we’re going might be more likely to put you in the right state of mind for what we need to talk about.”

“What makes you think I want to talk?” Will replied indignantly.

“I think you have questions that you’d like answered,” Hannibal retorted nonchalantly. Will couldn’t deny that. He wanted to understand why he was there and what Hannibal’s motives were. He needed to know the full story. But then again, Hannibal didn’t need to know that…

“I’m not interested in anything you have to say,” he snarled angrily. Hannibl seemed to take  second to absorb the harshness of his words before considering his reply.

“I understand that. But you must understand that I love you, Will. I’m not going to let you walk away that easily.”

“Love doesn’t entail kidnapping,” Will fumed, wanting to reach over with his foot, slam down on the breaks and have it out with Hannibal in the middle of the highway like a normal couple. Someone who loved him wouldn’t make a copy of his phone, wouldn’t lead him to believe he was going crazy and wouldn’t manipulate the termination of his relationship all without his knowledge. It was all falling into place in Will’s head. Hannibal had realised that the best way to end his relationship with Molly was to withdraw his care, leading Will to a breakdown. So he didn’t show up to their appointment, deleted all of the evidence of Will’s calls and left him to simmer in his increasingly unstable mental state until he cracked and Hannibal showed up as the hero. It was ingenious and evil.

“I couldn’t exactly let you escape, could I? The second you leave my care, you are at the mercy of the voice in your head. You would be a danger not only to yourself, but to others. I would be forced to have you arrested, given your record of violence against your wife, who I persuaded not to involve the police by the way. She wanted you sectioned, but I wouldn’t have it.”

Will shouldn’t have reasonably been either surprised or mildly betrayed at that point, but his feelings when it came to Hannibal had surpassed predictability or even rationality. “So my choice is to either be with you, or be sent to a psych ward?” Will asked dryly, brimming with rage, then spat, “I know which one I’d choose.”

“Do you?”

Will hated it when Hannibal did that. It’s not like he expected an answer and Will wasn’t planning on giving him one. But he liked trying to make Will question himself because he knew that he was never entirely sure of his own motives and if he searched hard enough then he may just find one that Hannibal would like.

Will turned back to the window and tried to look out for any road signs that might give a clue as to where they were. Given the approximate time of day, he could only assume that they’d been driving for hours. They could be well into Canada. Or maybe not, Will reasoned, noting that they appeared to be moving South West according the positioning of the sun. He got his first real clue, however, when he saw a sign stating that they were leaving Tennessee and entering Alabama. Then he knew where they were heading.

As expected, the drive back to Louisiana was long and arduous. Thankfully for Will, that meant a lot of pit stops during which he was able to get away from Hannibal. True to his word, Hannibal allowed Will to roam freely. Untrue to his own word, Will obediently returned to the car after every break. He truly did require some answers, he reasoned. And although he was still untrusting of Hannibal’s words, he knew that risking losing his mind at a gas station hundreds of miles from anywhere he could call home just wasn’t worth the risk.

It was dusk when they finally reached Louisiana, but from there it was anyone’s guess to which of Will’s childhood homes Hannibal was taking him. Could it be Miss Barbaret’s children’s home? Maybe even the boatshed? The shack where he lived as a boy?

It turned out to be the latter, though having decided to spare Hannibal his conversation, he wasn’t yet entirely clear on why he’d decided to bring him there. But curiosity finally got the better of him and he asked, “What the hell are we doing here?” just as the car pulled up to his old road.

He hadn’t had any neighbours, not by the conventional use of the word anyway. It was just his old house, now standing broken and alone in the middle of nowhere. It wasn’t a house that would be considered at all acceptable for the modern families in the area, however, so he supposed it had just been allowed to slowly die along with his father. Or maybe his father had moved out long before he’d died? Not that Will would know, he thought, feeling something rise within him at the thought of his father that he quickly tried to repress. At that, he had the answer to his question, though Hannibal answered him anyway as the car came to a stop right outside his former home.

“When I took you back to your old place in Wolf Trap, I saw how you reverted to the man you were back then. It allowed you better insight into yourself. Now I need you to revert back to the boy you were at 6 years old. I need you to finally come to terms with your childhood, Will.”

“Believe me, I have,” Will drawled and was almost embarrassed when he heard his former Louisiana accent slip out. He coughed to cover it up.

“No, you haven’t. I’ve seen that there are still parts of your mind that you’re afraid to touch. Until you confront those things, you won’t be able to confront the Voice for what it is.”

“And what is it exactly?” Will barked at him, despising this topic every time it arose. Only now, he was a little more aware of Hannibal’s intentions in bringing it up.

“You know,” Hannibal said solemnly, then opened the car door and got out. He walked around the front of the car and opened up Will’s door, too. Will sat silently with his arms folded until Hannibal stood back. Then finally, he undid his seatbelt and stepped out of the car, still ignoring Hannibal as he walked up to the front door. Unsurprisingly, it wasn’t locked and he entered, but he wasn’t prepared for what happened when he stepped inside.

Will’s heart was crippled as he crossed the threshold of the house and saw it all hollowed out, nothing but dust and shadows cast from nowhere and nothing. He could see the spot where the old leather armchair sat, where he would perch on the edge and listen to their gramophone warbling out familiar tunes from years and years ago. He had to wonder whether it would all still be there, had things gone a little differently. If he hadn’t ever…—

He finally broke. A delusion that he’d been trying to believe for so many years snapped inside of him and he felt it. He felt it all like someone had just grabbed one of his ribs and broken it violently in two. One of the jagged shards of bone pierced his heart and the truth came spurting out. Will’s eyes filled with tears and he could taste the copper blood clogging up his lungs as he tried to speak.

“Will,” Hannibal murmured, approaching him from behind and placing his hands with delicacy around his shoulders, voice full of concern. At that point, Will was too caught up in his own pain to flinch away or even distrust Hannibal’s touch at all.

“I drained the life from this place. It was all me,” Will choked, tearing himself away from Hannibal’s arms and walking deeper into the darkness, where old trauma was beckoning him. “My Papa…”

“None of that was your fault.” Hannibal’s voice sounded so sure and supportive. Will smiled at his blind, blind faith and shook his head solemnly.

“No, it was _all_ my fault.” Will turned to face Hannibal and was finally ready to confess his sins. May he be punished, the wicked man that he was. With his heart draining its sombre secrets and his tongue finally freed from the bindings it had been tied to for years, Will confessed: “My father wasn’t abusive. He only hit me once and it was an accident. I lied about it all. I lied for years.”

Hannibal’s shock was barely recognisable under his cool demeanour, but Will saw the slight raising of his eyebrows, the twitch of his brow. It was the muted reaction that could only have been perfected by a psychiatrist. “Why?”

“I didn’t get taken away so I could be protected from him. I did it to protect him from me.” Will’s voice cracked as tears began to stream down his face. He remembered weeping and muffling his cries of pain as he took the cigarettes he’d stolen from his father’s bedside table and stubbed them out on his skin. With trembling fingers, he reached over his head to press the burning hot tip against the backs of his shoulders, then counted slowly to 10 as his skin seared horribly. All the while, he could only hear the screams. The Voice screaming at him, demanding him to _“Stop it, stop it now!”_ He did it every night for a week, stealing the cigarettes a couple at a time and hoping they would go unnoticed, before finally breaking his own arm on the last night. That was the easy part. He only had to go to the back door, heavy and sturdy, and slam it shut with his arm stuck outside. The crack of bone was so sickening and loud that he was surprised his father hadn’t woken up. He slept through the pain that night, cradling his limp limb and quietly whimpering. When he was dropped off at the local school, his teachers were quick to question how he got it and he was quick to answer them. The broken arm, the burn marks on his back, all his father. Why would they doubt him? No 6-year-old could do that to himself.

He was whisked away. He never saw his father again. Though he didn’t think he could have faced him again.

“Did it want you to hurt him?” Hannibal asked softly, taking the opportunity to try to approach him, but Will backed away hurriedly, shaking his head and biting his lip. He couldn’t look at Hannibal’s face. He couldn’t let him see all the shame that burned on his face.

“It wanted me to _kill_ him…” Will choked. “I nearly did. It never stopped asking, begging, pleading.”

All the horrid words came pouring back and Will couldn’t take it. He let out a strangled cry like a dying animal and turned away. He saw Hannibal flinch at the sound, instinctively reach for him, but Will turned nonetheless.

“You can’t continue to let this weigh on you, Will. All these years, it’s been lingering at the back of your mind, making you feel the need to repent for it. But it wasn’t your fault.” Hannibal was assuring and suddenly reverted to his therapeutic status, but Will only shook his head violently.

“No, no, no… I accused him of child abuse. I lied for years. I ruined his life and never saw him again. It was my fault! My Papa was a good man. He didn’t know how to love, but he was a good man!” Will bellowed the words, before he finally allowed himself to calm down slightly. He allowed himself to admit what had been weighing on his mind for weeks, that niggling thought that had crept in whenever Hannibal spoke and made the Voice quiet. “I don’t think you’re a good man, Hannibal Lecter.”

He was glad of the fact that he couldn’t see Hannibal’s face at that moment. They both knew that he meant something more than the betrayal that Will was already aware of. More than manipulation and lies and more than kidnapping. He meant there was a dark side to Hannibal; a much, much darker side that Will had so far only caught very brief glances of…

After a long pause, Hannibal asked in a surprisingly calm voice, “Why is that?” as if he had been expecting Will to say it sooner.

Will struggled to say it. He didn’t want to believe it and he didn’t want to have to face it at all. But he had to. “Because it likes you. It doesn’t like anybody, but it likes you. And I’m not sure what that says about you as a person.”

Will felt no relief at getting the concern off his chest. There was a short moment of respite followed by crushing dread at what kind of flood gates his answer may have opened. Because a sadistic maniac taking a liking to you wasn’t good for anybody. _Anybody._

“It likes you, too,” Hannibal stated quietly. “So what does that say about you?”

Will gulped. That was the exact interpretation he’d feared.

“I don’t know,” Will answered shakily, before suddenly taking off and running from the room. He raced to the back door and heard Hannibal follow him. Will circled back round to the front of the house and took off down the road, immediately knowing where his feet were carrying him.

A remote bank by the river hummed under the watchful eye of a fat, silver moon. The waters of a squalid lake shifted uncomfortably under the authoritative glow. The grassy embankment was long overgrown, dominated by nestles and prickling weeds. Instead of crawling into its unkempt womb, Will sat down at the edge of the path and crossed his legs. If only he could turn back time, he dreamt longingly, before all of this, all of his life. If only he could be that little boy again. Surely, he could have changed something? Made it all happen differently?

But Will’s embryonic reverie was hastily crushed by reality as Hannibal approached in the distance. He strode calmly up the road in his long coat, looking like a tiger stalking its prey.

“Please don’t run from me, Will,” he implored, still cautiously nearing the other man with his hands held up in an honest display of subservience.

Will snorted. “I’m not afraid of _you_ , Hannibal. I was never afraid of anybody. I didn’t need to be.”

A couple of feet away, Hannibal stopped, then crouched down at the edge of the path and planted himself next to Will, though wisely keeping his distance.

“The Voice made you feel strong. It protected you, just like it promised to.”

Will flinched at the cutting accuracy of Hannibal’s words, then conceded with a slow nod.

“It isolated me. Until you, that is.” Will took a shaky breath. “You made me love you. The same way the Voice befriended me, you fostered dependency until you were the only person I could think about, the only person I needed.” Will bit his lip, angry at both Hannibal and himself, before finally asking the question that had been maddening him ever since he’d discovered the phone. “What grand scheme was your seduction all a part of?” Will finally found the courage to turn and look at Hannibal, his eyes bearing pools of betrayal and heartbreak such that Hannibal had to turn away.

“No grand scheme,” he sighed, “it was an accident.”

Will balked at the pure integrity he heard, but forced himself to keep looking at Hannibal’s face, certain he could read any dishonesty.

“A happy accident?”

“A _very_ happy accident. I was honest when I said I saw something special in you, Will. But you wanted to hide it away, while I wanted to draw it out. As I did so, I found more than I had expected to.”

“And somehow, I did too.” Will laughed bitterly. “How could I have been so blind?”

But Will knew how. He’d always seen what he wanted to see in Hannibal and turned him into a god. That was on him. Though Hannibal had done very little to discourage it. He’d only wanted to help Will, even in his own fucked up way. It just got out of control. Personal feelings got involved.

Taking the pause as a good sign, Hannibal used the opportunity to shuffle closer and Will submitted by leaning over to rest his head on Hannibal’s shoulder. He soon felt a cloying hand making gentle strokes through his hair, tenderly pulling out the tangles. It didn’t provide the same nourishing comfort that it once did, though.

“It gave me to you. It knew you could make me great.” It was all dawning on Will at once. That small snippet of conversation that he’d recalled in his dream just that morning. _Give him to me and I’ll give him to you._  “You made a deal with it, didn’t you? You said that you’d give me back to it. You never had any intention of curing me,” Will said softly, already knowing the strength of the truth in his words, but Hannibal shook his head defiantly.

“My _only_ intention was curing you. I believe I am still curing you. I spoke to it and told it what it wanted to hear. If it helped me get close to you, then I would shape you into the man it always wanted you to be… The man _you’ve_ always wanted to be. The man who would make the Voice obsolete.”

“My salvation lies in my becoming.” Will intended it as a question, but it came out more as a statement of fact.

“ _Two souls, alas, are dwelling in my breast. And one is striving to forsake its brother_.” Hannibal spoke and together they drank in the cool night.

“But maybe…” Will paused and squeezed his eyes tightly shut as he rushed out the final blow of honesty to himself. “Maybe we’re not two souls. Maybe I’ve always been kidding myself. It’s all me and I just fabricated this other entity to blame.”

Hannibal remained silent and Will knew that it was a testament to the fact that he believed Will had just spoken the truth, confirmed a theory that he had perhaps had since the very beginning. Maybe it was the thing that had initially intrigued him: a man with mind so great that he could conceptualize almost to the point of physical manifestation a spirit to hide the darker extremes of his mind inside.

“The more I fight it, the more it fights back,” Will sighed.

“You can be a good man or a stable man. You’re not sure which one you prefer.”

“I know which one I prefer,” Will mumbled, drawing his knees into his body. “And I’m pretty sure that answer doesn’t allow for me to be the other.”

“Perhaps it is more important that you have the choice than it is to get the outcome you would like the most. What is the outcome you’d like the most?”

“To go home,” Will admitted, his voice tired and his body aching. There was nothing he wanted more than to just resume the normality of a couple of days ago. Then, the biggest struggle for him was attempting to help Hannibal with dinner.

“Where is home?” Hannibal asked, again pushing Will to deeply consider his own motivations.

Will shocked himself when he didn’t even briefly think of his childhood house, or his home in Wolf Trap, or Apartment 3B. He didn’t even spare a second for the townhouse in Baltimore. He only thought of delicate hands wrapping around his wrists; fingers playfully coiling around the curls in his hair; the fragrance of wine and a dimly lit room with soft lips pressing firmly against his.

He shook his head and cursed at himself. “You’ve messed up my head, Hannibal. I don’t even know which thoughts are mine and which thoughts are ones that you’ve implanted there.”

“You have to take ownership of your thoughts, Will. It’s time to be honest with yourself.”

“I know. You’re right.” Will leaned into Hannibal even more and accepted his protection as Hannibal placed an arm around him. He remembered how he’d seen Hannibal as his guardian angel to defeat his inner devil and realised then that his mistake may have been trying to reduce morality to a dichotomy. There was more to himself than the side that fought for good versus the side that fought for bad. When he accepted that, he would reach peace finally. With giving up his final secret to Hannibal back at his old house, he felt as if he’d confessed his last sin to his priest and his slate had been wiped clean. Just as Hannibal had said, he had nothing to repent for any more. The fight between good and evil seemed to die inside Will at that very moment. There was no clear victor, but they’d made a truce. His conjoined twin didn’t separate and fall off, but seemed to merge back into him and Will begrudgingly accepted it. “I can be a good man still,” he assured himself, feeling whatever was left of the Voice settle somewhere deep within him and silence itself, this time for good.

“There is no clear understanding yet of what makes a man good, but we do have some inkling of what can make a man great. I know you, Will. I’ve seen inside your mind and it will bring you greatness. You must first understand that blood and breath are only elements undergoing change to fuel your radiance.”

“Is that what fuels your radiance?” Will asked sullenly, turning his head to look up at Hannibal.

“I think you’ve already worked out the answer to that. Tell me, do you believe that I am a good man, or a great man?”

Will knew what his answer was and yet said nothing. Hannibal interpreted the silence aptly as understanding: he was coming to understand what Hannibal was. Will thought about all his probing questions, trying to get him to convince himself that the Voice and him were one. Kill and eat, Hannibal had told him as he’d subtly administered touch therapy, implanting thoughts in Will’s head that weren’t entirely his yet weren’t entirely foreign either.

Hannibal was waiting for Will’s verdict, given his new knowledge.

Eventually, Will spoke. “Do you think that this could still work out if we just got back in the car and drove home?”

“That depends on how heavily you want to involve yourself.”

“I don’t want to be involved at all.”

“Don’t you? Think of the fish, Will. You kill and eat it for nothing short of your own pleasure, but you don’t need to feel guilty about that.”

Those words were enough to convince Will of the answer to the questions that had been plaguing him, specifically the extent to which Hannibal’s darkness extended. Images of them preparing dinner passed through his mind. He remembered the small, proud smile Hannibal had given him as he’d diced up the meat, rubbed in the spices, sliced it from the bone. Will’s stomach turned.

“Having me isn’t enough, is it? You need me to be like you.”

“I only want what’s best for you. I want for you to be intimate with your instincts.”

“And what happens if I say no? You leave and the Voice comes back?”

“I’m giving you a solution that suits us both.”

“Your solution is blackmail.”

“As much as it’s up to you to determine what you want from our relationship, it’s also up to me to set my own terms.”

Hannibal pulled back and stood up, dusting off his clothes before pulling open his coat and drawing a long knife. Will was totally confounded, yet didn’t back away. Hannibal flipped the knife around and held it out to Will, handle first.

“You need to decide: do you want to be a good man, or a stable man?” Will stared at the handle held directly in front of his face and the glistening blade that led up to Hannibal’s hand, then his arm, then his expectant face. But Hannibal had revealed his hand too early in the game. The extent to which his schemes had gone made it clear that he never had any intention of leaving Will there or giving up on drawing out the monster inside him. It was ultimately a bluff, but one that he appeared completely confident in.

Then, nauseatingly, Will realized that he had also given himself up to early. His answer was already apparent. He had nothing left to barter with, not since he’d confessed his love. More so, he wasn’t entirely sure just how much of him had the fight left to repress the side of himself that was silently longing to take the knife and just finally submit.

With a trembling hand, Will reached up and took the knife.

“Good boy.” Hannibal swiftly turned on his heel and started walking back to Will’s old house.

For a second, Will considered leaping upon Hannibal and slicing his throat, leaving his body to the animals and the dirt and escaping. But it was only a passing thought. Then he rose to his feet and trailed after Hannibal, back down the dirt road.

This time, nothing followed.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I can't believe I actually finished something, for the first time in my life :')
> 
> I've never finished a fic before, but this just kind of became my baby this January. It's been sort of a hectic time the entire month, since someone in my family passed away and then I realised I wanted to quit my job and move back home. I said, "I'm going to spend my GAP year doing something I am really passionate about." This has been one of those things. It hasn't been stressful, it's just been a great way to relax and get out all my creative energy.
> 
> As for the uh "twist" (if it can be called that) with his father, that was something I had planned from the start out of some twisted desire to subvert the abusive parent trope. It used to be in EVERY fic I read when I was younger, so I promised myself I'd never write it and then came up with this story that started off with a child getting hit...
> 
> But ultimately, I hope everything was explained in this chapter. If not, drop a comment if you'd like anything explained. I won't write an epilogue, but if this strikes you as ambiguous, feel free to ask what I had in mind for their future...
> 
> Thank you thank you thank you to everyone who commented, left kudos or bookmarked :) It was all really encouraging, especially since before I posted this I hadn't really written anything seriously in years, now I'm writing all the time and I have another story called The Black Rose that I have high hopes for too!


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